Helpie FAQ
Transcripts from the Deeper Dating Podcast
- How To Identify Diversity In Ourselves
- How To Find Our Core Gift
- Two Solutions: Internal And External
Try This When It’s Too Hard To Love

How To Identify Diversity In Ourselves
When I could do that, it was like liberation. It was like the same liberation as coming out as gay. It was the same liberation, “Oh my God, I could be a part of this world and I can love,” and then the walls begin to come down. How do we identify these parts of ourselves? We’re going to start with looking at the ways that we feel that we’re not capable of love or not ready for love, or we block love consistently, or we just go numb or shut down or stop feeling, whatever the things are that we have. You could even just take a minute now to think about this. The ways that you feel like, “I just don’t cut it when it comes to love, or I’m too different, or this part of me is too strange.” Essentially, these are places where we either feel like we’re too much or that we’re not enough, and there’s a shame and a feeling that we won’t be loved because we’re either too much or not enough.
How To Find Our Core Gift
How do we do this? How do we go from the place that we’re ashamed of? The ways in which we are kind of intimacy divergent, or we feel not enough, or we feel like too much in the realm of intimacy. How do we take that and find the Core Gift in those places where we have been ashamed, and we feel like we don’t love right, or that we are not right? How do we find the Core Gift? This is a kind of rich and complex process and, you know, I spend huge amounts of time in my intensives and in my book and my course, teaching how people can identify their Core Gifts, but there are some simple things that I can say about that, that I think really help.
Two Solutions: Internal And External
The solution is twofold, and this is like what I really believe. I believe that there are two things that we can do. Two very clear things, one is internal and one is external, to help us find these parts of ourselves, learn to treasure them, find their magic and find their genius and find their potential and find their beauty, and then be able to stand behind them, and be intimate in a way that makes room for them, because when we don’t do that, we create walls. We shut out love because our psyche, our deep psyche knows that we will not be able to protect those parts of ourselves because we’re ashamed of them. We’ll try to override them or suppress them, and when our deep psyche knows that, it says, “I’m going to keep you out of a good relationship because that could be devastating. If you can’t take care of me like that, it could go really bad,” so then we choose unavailable people, or we stay solo or single or both. The first task is to find the beauty in our intimacy diversity. To find the worth and the value in the places we feel not enough, to find the tenderness, the desire for peace, the desire for people to be happy and comfortable, a quietness of spirit, a deep internalized aspect of our being that goes really far and really deep in, not just out, and for qualities of kind of intensity; our passion, our ferocity, our ambition, our aliveness, our desire to eat the world, our desire to be real, our desire to grapple with and wrestle with and live in connection and context.
Important Links:
- Deeper Dating®
- DeeperDating®.com
- DeeperDatingPodcast.com
- Veronica Grant
- Madeline Charles
- VeronicaGrant.com/podtour
- David Schechter
- Elaine Aron
- Janeane Garofalo
Table of Contents:
How To Rewire Your Attractions To Find Real And Healthy Love
The 3 Keys To Transforming Your Dating Life – And Your Future


First Question
Let me start upfront by saying what these three steps are. The first one is this question that could, and should, shape your entire search for love from now on, “Does my soul feel safe with this person?” Yes, there are a lot of other questions that need to be answered too, but this is the number one question. The second is to look for your attractions of inspiration and avoid your attractions of deprivation, and even make a pledge to do that. We’re going to do that in this episode. Each of you is going to have an opportunity to kind of make a personal pledge inside about this, which I have found is remarkably powerful.Take Time
The third one is a kind of complex one, and it’s about taking the time to build healthy, sexy, deep, authentic connection, to create that kind of circuitry, not to flee, and to build the tools to allow that rewiring to happen. I’m going to be talking about each one of these. Let me go back to each of these now. The first one, this question, this defining, organizing principle, this question number one, “Does my soul feel safe with this person?” I think maybe the most misguided aspect of all dating advice is all the things we put before that question. Sexual attraction takes care of itself. It’s either there, it’s not there or it grows. All of those things are possible.Look For Your Attractions
Other kinds of attraction as well are really rich and important, and they’re all essential, but the first question is, “Am I inspired by who this human being is? Do I feel safe with who they are as a being, and with who they are in the world, and with who they are with me?” Because that is the number one definer of how happy your future is going to be with this person. I truly believe that. We get taught that the first question is, “Am I attractive enough?” Maybe the second question or for some people, the first question is, “Am I attracted enough? Is the potential for lust there?” It’s a great and fabulous question, but the first question needs to be this, because it routes you in a different direction. There’s a subtle realignment. It gives you dignity. It shifts your field. It conveys a message of self-dignifying. That shows, people feel that, and also, it’s just a different way to orient. I’m just so excited about people making that shift and having that become their primary question, and writing back to me or going to my website, DeeperDatingPodcast.com, and letting me know, and letting everyone know what shifts you see, because you will see shifts. It’s something we’re not taught. The people who find healthy love the most easily are the people who know this. It just really comes down to that, so play with this. Play with this tool and watch how it shifts you. Also, I’ll say another thing about that. When you make that your central question, you actually heal your own attachment wounds and evolve your attachment style to a healthier kind of version of itself. That’s number one, is to let that be your first question, and thinking about how that is going to shift your landscape gives me great joy just to think about. Be with someone whom your soul feels essentially safe, loved for the future.CLICK TO TWEETOkay, the second one is, and it comes from the first one, and it is recognizing your attractions of deprivation and your attractions of inspiration, and making a choice to only pursue your attractions of inspiration. I think that one of the places that people who are pursuing this path of mindful dating is getting stuck in a relationship with someone who, again and again, you see is not able to meet your needs for integrity or essential availability or mental health or presence. You try again and again and again and again, and maybe you know consciously this person is not going to ever be the one for me, or they are certainly not now, but it’s just too hard to stop. I can’t tell you how much this is an issue for so many conscious wonderful people who are just sticky, sticky, sticky in a relationship like that, and this does involve a degree of withdrawal.

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Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!Table of Contents:
- Understanding Your Truth
- Not Wanting To Be More Than Friends
- Cherishing Your Core Gifts
- Extra Spark
- Mirror Image
Deeper Dating Q&A: Expert Advice For All Your Questions About Love, Dating And Sex


Understanding Your Truth
I was speaking with someone recently who had been through college and left, and didn’t have a good experience. They had this revelation which was, “I was not my true gender identity,” which is gender-fluid, non-binary. “I was not that me, so I couldn’t appreciate or live in the college experience because I was denying who I was.” This woman had a deeply rich experience of her truth which is that she so wanted a child. That was her truth. Here’s what I want to say about that. I understand that journey. Having a child is not for everyone, but if you do have that deep longing or, listeners, any deep longing that is so deep, that it actually feels like it’s your identity, or can lead you to these kinds of revelation experiences of emotion just flooding out when you recognize something. If you don’t pursue it, you limit yourself. If you don't pursue your dream, you are limiting yourself.CLICK TO TWEETI remember somebody saying something really wise to me when I was going on that journey. I just want to say this is not just about having kids. These ideas apply to your mission and your passion, and it might be to have a relationship. It could be anything. It might be to really embrace the fact that you’re an artist or you want to write a book or whatever it is. The stoppage that happens isn’t just the stoppage of that particular impulse. It’s a stoppage of the flow of your being, which has profound repercussions. I was talking to somebody about my own desire to have a child and my fear. I said, “I’m a psychotherapist. I don’t make a ton of money. I don’t have the savings that can allow me the freedom to just get an au pair and not worry about this, and I’m single, and I’m single. How am I going to do this? How am I going to date? How am I going to have a life?” She said something so beautiful and wise to me. She said, “You’re evaluating your life now and imagining what it would be like having a child in your life now, but when you make this commitment to have a child, the circle of your experience will widen and broaden.” She said that there’s a German saying which is, “A child brings its own luck,” but she said, “What that means is that the circle of your luck is going to expand,” and God knows it did, and that’s how I found my wonderful husband and now my other two children. It was through pursuing that deep longing and impulse. This is where I get to say to all of you, what’s yours? What’s your deep longing? What have been those moments that you got kind of like hit with a longing that almost felt torrential or powerful or profound? Maybe not like that, but just in some simple and steady way really identifies who you are. That is your soul and you will widen the circle of your luck by embracing that, because you’ll widen the love in your life because you’ll be living love, and in this case, love of self and love of your mission, so that’s this kind of esoteric truth, is that when we block the flow of that, we crimp our being. We diminish our being. It’s an act of quiet violence against our being, and violence begets violence. In this case, what that means is that if we reduce ourselves by not pursuing our dream, somehow we will encounter situations again and again that conspire to reduce us. As Jung said, “It’s going to feel like fate, but what it really is, is the shadow of the dreams that we are not embracing.”Not Wanting To Be More Than Friends
Okay, so moving on next. Someone else spoke about being in her 60s and dating. What she finds is that guys keep just wanting to be friends. Again and again, the guys that she goes out with, she kind of stays in a friend zone with them because she senses that that is what they want, that they only want to be friends. She was speaking about one guy that she had gone out with for a really long time, and is still connected to that has landed kind of solidly in that friend zone, and she had a revelation. She realized that she didn’t have the courage to tell him that she was interested in exploring something deep. She said it just made her feel so vulnerable. She acknowledged that she just didn’t feel like she had the courage to do it.
Cherishing Your Core Gifts
That’s the second stage of the deeper dating journey. The first stage is the discovery and naming and cherishing of your Core Gifts. The second is the re-education of your attractions because we cannot force our sexual attractions, and we should not try to. However, we can educate over time our sexual and romantic attractions, and the tools for doing that are the tools that are going to help you keep sex and love and romance alive when you find your beloved, but that’s for another episode and another discussion. The kind of first layer of experience that she has had has been the layer of experience of, “This keeps happening to me.” We all have like a lot of stories as we get older especially of, “This keeps happening to me.” Although I know 18-year-olds and 19-year-olds and 20-year-olds who totally can tell the “This is what keeps happening to me” story, but we need to stop and examine that. What is it that keeps happening for you? Because whatever that is, there’s so much to be learned from that. Not just what to stay away from, but also if anything keeps happening again and again, it’s a deeper and richer statement about the parts of ourselves that we have not learned to honor, dignify and have wiser custody over. We need to become a student of our patterns.CLICK TO TWEETThe two link, the places where we don’t love ourselves, are connected in very rich and sometimes complex, sometimes simple ways. They’re the kind of people that we’re sexually and romantically attracted to. This is a rich and amazing thing that all of us should learn to understand. In my book, in my courses, and all of my work, I teach that in really clear structured ways, which is something I’m very passionate about. Anyway, so she reached the point where she had this first story of, “This always is what keeps happening to me, which is guys keep just wanting to be my friend,” but then in reflecting in a deeper way, she realizes that there’s something deeper here, which is that she is afraid of sharing the part of herself that wants to depend, that wants to need, that wants to lean in, that wants to be held, that wants to say yes to a deeper, committed relationship, and this is gold. When we can see how we’re afraid of intimacy and playing that out, we have gold. That’s where we need to get help. That’s where we need to get support, at exactly that juncture, because that juncture is gold. It might knock us to our knees that saying that the truth will set you free but first, it will make you miserable. Yeah, that’s true but she’s got it. She’s got it and what that is, is that she is not having the courage to own her deep longing for intimacy and connectedness which is her treasure. This is your treasure, so what do you do about it? First, you validate yourself for seeing it. I want to ask every listener here to take a minute now. What is your “This always happens to me” kind of story? You know the truth of that piece of it. What might be the deeper truth of what you are afraid to reveal or honor or cherish? You might not have an answer yet. Another way to ask that question is, “What does your wiser self have to say to you about what you are not doing in your search for love? Is there any piece of wisdom, something your friends have told you, something you know that you’re kind of preferring to avoid, but you know it’s like really a big deal and really important? I had a friend who said to me once. I’ve talked about this before, but she said to me after my being single for like decades and decades, and really upset about it and wanting a partner. She said, “Ken, I know why you don’t have a partner and you kind of know why too.” I said, “Please educate me because no, I don’t.” She said, “You’re always going to the bars. You’re always going to the clubs. You’re going to look for people in those environments, but not in places with people who share your values.” I proceeded to ignore that with great passion for about 8 to 10 more years, and then finally, kind of was brought to my knees and said, “Yeah, that’s true and that’s what I need to do.” Anyway, what I want to say to you, you’re feeling like you don’t have the courage. When we feel like we don’t have the courage for something, there is a simple response to that. We do the internal processes to build courage. Yes, but we don’t bank on those. We don’t count on those. We almost give up on those, trying to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, and we look for connection and support. I promise you, you will be able to take that next step infinitely better if you have friends or a coach or a therapist or a group or a combination thereof of people who can support you in this terrifying experience of saying, “This is who I really am, and this is what I want.”
Extra Spark
So often, your focus, get to know this guy if it’s still a possibility, but here’s what I would say. Who knows if that like kind of extra spark that you felt was missing will come? If it doesn’t come, you will know. If it comes and goes, then you know that this is worth pursuing and exploring. What happens when it comes? What happens when it goes? If it comes in a strong way, which it really might, that’s a glorious thing.Mirror Image
Okay, I’m trying to move a little more quickly so I’m going to move to the next one now, which is just kind of so fascinating. It’s the mirror image. It’s someone who also has spoken about how much she has kind of loved this content, and how it has helped her and changed her. She said, “I was with someone who saw me as what I call an attraction of inspiration, but he went back to a toxic rollercoaster relationship.” She suspects that it’s the wave of distancing, which is when someone is available and decent and kind, and all of a sudden, we lose interest in them, and we kind of start devaluing them in our head, or all of a sudden, we start remembering this hot, unhealthy relationship, and we want to go back there. This is such a deep human tendency that we have not been instructed about. She said she feels compelled to share what she has learned from Deeper Dating, this concept of the wave, which I think is the single biggest saboteur of healthy, new love. She wondered, “Should I speak to this guy? Should I tell him what I’ve learned?” I would say, “Sure.” You can kind of offer one of my Psychology Today articles, the podcast episode, or any of those things where I talked about the wave and say, “I just wonder what you think about this, and might this have been something that has been true for us?” That’s really all you can do. If there’s continued dialogue, then that’s great, but you can certainly offer that. I just feel like, absolutely, why not, but realize that this person is in the throes of an avoidance of intimacy, quite possibly, and also quite possibly, a romantic obsession, and those are powerful things like any addiction that we don’t have as much control over as we’d like to, but I say, “Sure, why not plant the seed?”
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Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!Table of Contents:
- The Two Things That Made The Biggest Difference
- Understanding Meditation
- Create Your Own Personal Practice
- Tapping Acupuncture Points
Create Your Personal Love-Wisdom Practice
Finding Your Inner Intimacy-GPS


The Two Things That Made The Biggest Difference
I remember thinking, what are the things that allowed me most to move from chronically single and enacting these patterns again and again that I really, really thought would work, and just didn’t work again and again? What were the things? The two things that made the biggest difference to me were my support group of chronically single shrinks and the friends who mentored me. That kind of connection and support that got me out of my own patterned attempts to find love, that were failing again and again as much as I believed in them, and the other was a spiritual practice. I did for a long time, I still do a spiritual practice. I am someone who’s been meditating I guess about 40 years in my life, a really, really long time. I’ll say a little bit more about that, but during the time that I committed to my search for love in a more intense way, I had a daily spiritual practice that was specifically about finding love. As much as anything, these particular two things, my spiritual practice and the connection and support of other people who could take me out of my patterned ways of doing things, those were the big things that made the hugest, hugest difference. I believe in them so much and they’re humbling. They’re both humbling because in both of those cases, it’s this realization that my patterned ways that I believed in so deeply just like weren’t the wisest way to do this, and so meditation was really important to me. If you're experiencing any psychological symptoms that concern you, it's a great idea to get professional help.CLICK TO TWEETUnderstanding Meditation
I’m going to talk a little bit more very shortly about the practices that I used, that I believe in so deeply, and work with you to create your own personal practice, meditation practice, spiritual practice that is built and designed to help you in your precious and amazing and profoundly important search for love, but first, I want to talk a little bit about the value of meditation, but I’m going to precede that with something else. I just want to say, if you are thinking, “I can’t meditate because I can’t still my mind,” welcome to the club. I have been meditating for 40 years and I cannot still my mind. It’s the rarest thing in the world for me to still my mind. Now, does that mean that my meditations aren’t life-changing, beautiful, amazing, delicious, powerful, essential? No. They are but I just suck at stilling my mind and you can still meditate. I’m going to talk about that a little bit more. Also, meditation does not have to be this dry, boring thing. I hate dry, boring meditation. I can’t stand it. My meditations are rich and intense and beautiful and life-changing. Don’t think that you just need to do a meditation that bores you. I will say though that some of the meditations that you might think are boring, like some of the meditations of watching your breath or saying a mantra are anything but boring when you stay with them. They can be deep and rich and amazingly beautiful. I’m just saying that too, but you don’t have to do them. You do not have to have rigor. You do not have to have amazing discipline. You just do your best. I just want to share a story with you. As someone who is a very serious meditator and has been for like a crazy, crazy long amount of time, I follow a particular path of meditation. I will say that my guru, my spiritual teacher is a man named Paramahansa Yogananda who came to the States. He was the first Indian teacher to come to the States and stay for a really, really long time teaching. He was beloved by Gandhi. Gandhi bequeathed some of his ashes to him and he was just a great soul. I follow, since I was seventeen, his meditation path.
Create Your Own Personal Practice
Now, I want to help you kind of create a practice for yourself, and I want to offer you a few ideas. One is a contemplative kind of prayer practice that for me was a really, really important part of my spiritual practice to find love, and made a huge, huge, huge, huge difference. I actually teach this contemplative practice. It’s an ancient practice and I teach it in episode 26 in pretty good detail, but I’m going to give you kind of the basics of it here, and the basics are that you find the words that touch your heart deeply about your search for love, and it’s okay for the words to be an ask, like universal spirit, or maybe you don’t even name it, or maybe you say goddess, or maybe you say God, or maybe you say wisdom or strength inside me, untapped wisdom inside me. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Whatever it is, it’s beautiful and it’s vaster than our limited little mind, and we call on it. It’s like you ask, you ask and that asking should evoke a kind of real like longing, or a sense of this longing for a relationship in me is so true. It almost burns. It’s so deep. It’s so true. Yes, it hurts. Yes, it’s sad. Yes, it’s exquisite but it’s my truth and I’m going to ask. I’m going to ask the universe for help in making this dream happen. It doesn’t mean that I’m not going to do my own efforts, but it means that this vast and humble reaching out of arms and just asking is something that I do.
Tapping Acupuncture Points
I will share another practice that I love and it’s called tapping, and I haven’t done this yet but I will do, and I’m going to bring in a teacher who’s going to teach tapping to my audience. Many of you know tapping already, but it’s tapping along certain acupressure points, acupuncture points and then following a protocol. There are over 100 clinical studies proving the efficacy of this process that kind of like not only reduces stress, but can be used for meditation and brings you into a much deeper place. Every morning, I start out by doing twenty minutes of tapping, and then I do the inner mentor process. That’s my morning meditation and my coffee, of course. I love those morning meditations. I treasure them. They’re really, really wonderful.
Important Links:
- Deeper Dating
- DeeperDating.com
- Paramahansa Yogananda
- Gandhi
- Self-Realization Fellowship
- episode 26 – A Practice That Can Lead You to Love
- episode 3
- John McNeill
- The Church and the Homosexual
- Dating And Safety
- Dating Apps Dehumanizing People
- Advice On Online Dating
- Charly’s Fire
- Being Your True Self
- Red Flags
How To Protect Heart, Soul And Self In Online Dating: An Interview With Charly Lester
How To Practice Self-Care And Self-Protection In The World Of Online Dating

Dating And Safety
I deeply agree with that and that was kind of how I began in this entire journey. I was a single gay man who adopted a child and I had no time, and I thought, “What would be the most healing and effective way for me to meet people?” Also, I was an incredibly unskilled dater and I really had to be a student of what I was doing wrong to begin to change that, so I love that. I love that in the trenches kind of approach and caring about kind of the pain that you saw, and the missing pieces that you saw again and again. I would like to hear from you kind of just around this issue of safety; physical safety and emotional safety. Kind of, what are the things that stand out for you in the over 50 community, in any community at all? What are the key things that stand out for you? I think in terms of practical safety, I think the key thing, always, is to remember that you’re talking to strangers, and that applies even up on your third date, right? This is a third date. You’ve probably spent 4 or 5 hours in that person’s company. I always liken it to a fellow traveler on a train journey. I mean, you wouldn’t give that person your wallet and your address and your car keys, right? You hear these stories of people’s cars being stolen on a second date. I was like, “It’s because you handed your car keys to a stranger.” The reality is because we let our heart take over from our head. I think from a practical safety perspective, it’s remembering in those early stages, to try to listen to your head and to almost be like your brutal best friend. When you’re rushing ahead with things, think about it from the perspective of if your friend was telling you this story, what advice would you give him or her? I think sometimes we give ourselves different advice to the advice that we would give other people. I think that that’s really important. I think from an emotional perspective, I think the problem and I say this is someone who’s worked for multiple dating apps. I think one of the problems of dating apps, a by-product of dating apps is that people have become products, right? We can see people in the same way that we can view apartments, right, on an app on our phone. If I’m online shopping or if I’m looking for an apartment, then I click a load of things that I want and I can specify exactly what I want, right? “I need three bedrooms. I need a garage for my car.” Well, real life isn’t like that and people are not products, but the way that we see dating apps and the filters we see on dating apps, we start to dehumanize people. I think that that’s the problem with online dating, is to step away. We forget there are people in our pocket. We just see these cards that are the faces and the ages and the names, and we suddenly start forgetting there’s a real human being on the other side. I can remember really early on when I was writing my blog. I matched with a guy in the early days of Tinder, and we never went on the date, and part of it was from the way that he behaved with me. I met him six months later and he was a really lovely guy and I actually called him up on it. I said, “You are so nice. Why were you like this?” He admitted it himself. He said, “I know. I was chatting so many women. I forgot you were a real person and I just didn’t treat you how I would.” He was such a good friend, honestly, and I think that what’s quite startling is people behave completely differently to how they would in real life, and so you’re only seeing this one side of their personality. The gamification, the way that the app is designed to be a bit like a game to keep us on there, well it brings out that side of that person, and it’s not their whole self but it’s just what we see of them. I think the key is partly to remember there is a game aspect to this, that this is not total real life. It’s a great way to introduce you to people but it’s not the be-all and end-all.
Being Your True Self
I looked at myself and I actually, because on these dates, I would evaluate the date. Not the guy, but I would give the date that we went on marks out of ten, and on that write up I gave myself 2 out of 10 because I knew that I hadn’t brought my A-game to that date, and it wasn’t fair on the other person. I think that, you know, if you are feeling like your mental health is starting to get a bit sapped or just feeling a bit drained by it all, then take a step away because for me, I think the whole point of dating and the whole point of finding someone is by being your true self, right? I always say this, my advice when it comes to dating profiles is, “Don’t use filters. Don’t lie about anything because you’re not going to attract the right person, but you still need to be your proper self to attract the right person too. If you’re a rundown, knackered is a very English term, tired version of yourself. If you’re a rundown knackered version of yourself, then you’re not actually going to attract the right people for you. Because you’re going to attract people who maybe feed off that energy, and actually it could be quite disruptive to go at it when you’re feeling 25% or 50% because I feel like the type of people you’re going to attract is going to be a completely different type of person. I think that being quite self-aware, I think could be quite important in this and not just feeling like, “Oh, my God. I’ve been single for so long. I have to carry on at this even if I’m not enjoying it because when it comes down to it, this is your life, right? This is a part of your life and it should be enjoyable. You are spending time that you could be spending seeing your friends, doing other stuff, going on these dates. If you’re not enjoying it, just take some time out. That’s really great advice, and there are so many pieces to what you said. One is a kind of curation of self, that we don’t get to forget ourselves when we’re doing online dating. It’s really, really part of the experience. There’s been research and I’d love there to be more research on this, but this is something I have really found to be true. That when we get into what I call swipe circuitry, which is that gamification headspace, not only do we not notice the deeper qualities in somebody, but we actually are drawn more to our “scratch the itch” type. Research shows that the “scratch the itch” type is not always the best type. That’s why, in all the work that I do, I say, there’s one key question that we need to ask. Does my soul feel safe with this person? Is there a sense of deep safety? The same with ourselves as well. I love the different things that you’re saying, and that you could take a break. When you are not feeling in a centered, good place, you are not obligated to go out there and try to like gather more numbers. There’s a curation and a self-care, which I think is just wonderful. I think that’s a really good point.Red Flags
I think one of the key red flags for me is if something happens that you feel like you can’t tell your friends about, you know, like someone treats you in a way. That if you told your friends, they would tell you, “Don’t see this person again.” I think the minute you get into that territory, then you need to take a step back. If you can’t tell your best friends about the dating experience for some reason, then there’s something wrong, right? Again, that kind of goes back to being your own best friend. I love that. That is fabulous. That’s for everyone to remember because we kind of allow ourselves to compromise things that really matter to us, and when we do it and we don’t want to talk about it, then we’re engaging in acts that have a little bit of shame, and that is going to draw us to people who are prone to taking advantage of that. That’s a great point. Charly, can I ask you to introduce your friend here? I have two dogs. One under the chair and one on my lap. This is Hugo. You can just see him there behind the microphone, and then under my chair, Dudley is asleep. I have two sausage dogs.Dating Apps Dehumanizing People
Thank you so much for the introduction. I would love to hear your thoughts about kind of there’s a lot of research now that shows that being on dating apps, especially certain dating apps, Grindr is a really bad one for this. I think it’s like one of the worst, but being on dating apps, especially swipe dating apps can increase depression and anxiety for a lot of people because of the dehumanization that occurs. The key to practical safety in online dating always is to remember that you're talking to strangers.CLICK TO TWEETThis is actually particularly true in some ways for people of color, and there’s been powerful, powerful documentation of that. Could you just talk about how people can protect themselves emotionally in that way, from the kind of anxiety and depression that come from just being treated in dehumanizing ways? Yeah. I think this is a tricky part of dating, right, because we’re all being put into boxes. The way that the algorithms work is we get put into boxes. I am definitely feeling it as a 37-year-old female, right? Someone, I had a conversation just this week where someone was saying, “The power has changed when you were a 27-year-old female. You had power over men as a straight female.” Now, I’m in a zone where I clearly, if I want to have kids, it needs to happen soon. The guys know that the power is in their court, and so it is interesting and it affects lots of people in lots of different ways. As you mentioned, people of color, particularly women of color, really suffer from this, particularly dark-skinned black women are treated appallingly on dating apps because of fetishism, and because a lot of the apps allow you to filter based on race even within the black community. I know there’s a lot of racism internally with darker skin and these concepts, basically these awful concepts, that society has put on us that everyone needs to be a blue-eyed, blonde-haired bikini model. There’s a lot to unpick in society and there’s a lot then manifests itself when you start to give people boxes that they can take and say, “When people start thinking they have a choice and people start deconstructing people to a list of age, hair color, skin color, eye color, in a way that you wouldn’t actually do if you met someone at the bar, right. If I walk up to you in a bar, you can’t tell how old I am within probably a fifteen-year age gap. I wouldn’t be. I know I can’t age people within at least ten years, right? I don’t walk around with an age label on my head, and one of the things to remember, if you are feeling like you are being marginalized on these apps is you are not being rejected. The reality is you’re just not being seen because of the way these filters work, people aren’t even seeing you. I saw that firsthand when I turned from 29 to 30 on dating apps because suddenly, I had the exact same photos, right, because they were all about six months old. It was all that had changed. It’s literally within a day, I had ticked over a decade and suddenly, I wasn’t appearing in filters anymore. People had filtered me out. Quite often, men my own age filtered me out. I really noticed literally overnight, the drop in attention that I was getting. You can’t take it personally because what’s actually happening is you are ticking a box that someone else hasn’t ticked. They’re not looking at your picture and saying, “No, I don’t want her because she’s too old or she’s too ugly or he’s too camp or whatever you’re worrying about.” It’s not even got that far. It will be that they haven’t even seen you in the first place. It’s remembering that I think, and then I think it’s also really remembering that these tools should, all these tools should be is a form of introduction. They are not telling you your worth by any stretch. This is not a tool to measure your attractiveness to the opposite sex, for example. Dating apps are not a replacement for real-life interaction. They are just an opportunity to cast your net a bit wider, and maybe meet people who you wouldn’t meet in your neighborhood or in your bar or at work. I think it’s making sure that you frame it correctly in your head, because I think if you try and see it as a replacement for society or some value of your worth and you’re counting your own worth on how many matches you’re getting in a night, no one wins from that kind of thinking and you see that. There are definitely people, and this is one of the things that really angers me about people’s use of dating apps. I love dating apps. I don’t like the way people use dating apps. One of the things that really upsets me is when people who are not single-use dating apps to, “Let’s see how many people like me.” For example, and I’ve heard married couples doing this, right, where both partners go on an app, like as many people as they can, and then they compete to see who gets the most reciprocal likes. They have no intention of communicating with those people, and they’re just leading people on. You see it a lot, right? There’s nothing that dating apps can do. The dating apps can’t ask, “I need proof that you’re single.” What are you going to do? “Please prove that you didn’t have a marriage license.” It’s really tricky and you have to trust people. I think that it’s just worth remembering that people, we know this not just from dating. We know this from the whole online world. People are not their best selves when they’re behind a screen, and they think they can get away with something that they can’t get away with in real life. It’s just remembering that, right? That’s a really wonderful filter right there. If someone, even in that dehumanizing environment, still is human, still is kind, still is connected, extra brownie points for them because that’s really a sign, because you’re walking up a down escalator in order to do that. That’s a real mark in your favor. In developing our app, I did a lot of research and learn just such amazing things like for example, some huge percentage of college men never have an intention when they’re on dating apps to even hook up. They don’t even want to talk. They just want to see how many people, it’s like a boredom relief and a kind of self-confidence booster. There is literally no intention to even hook up or even speak. That’s like a shocking thing. I think that dating apps have been built brilliantly to generate matches, but terribly to create an environment of intimacy, and I think that has to change. I’d love to hear your thoughts on that too, like what can dating app creators do to create more humanity, to create more humanization? I’d love to hear any of your thoughts, dreams and reflections of what could be. I think it’s quite tricky because the reality is that for a successful dating app, you need numbers, and the way to have numbers is not to restrict your audience too much, right? Anytime you add any form of filter onto that audience, whether it’s sexuality, whether it’s age, whether it’s something more niche like an app for people with a certain type of hobby or religion, you are already filtering down a group that is already filtered because you’re already starting from a point that everyone has to be single, and so the group becomes smaller and smaller.
Advice On Online Dating
Yeah. That’s so interesting and that does happen a lot and of course, there are so many people who are older, who are looking for a deeply committed, connected, live-in relationship but these are things that are all true and all really different. What advice would you give women in that situation? Let’s say over 50, very aware of kind of what a buyer’s market is for men, how much immaturity there is out there, but who still have hope that there are great guys who are looking for someone like them. What’s your best advice for those women? What are the three key things that you would want to say to them as they enter the world of online dating? Yes, at first, I would say, be really honest. Be really honest about who you are. Don’t lie about your age. Don’t put filters on your photo. When I was at Lumen, honestly, I can’t tell you the filters that people are trying to put in their photos. We could see it because you have to selfie verify to join the app. We would see what people’s selfies looked like, and sometimes they look 30 years younger in the pictures that they were trying to upload to the app. There’s no point doing that if you want to meet someone in person. Why would you want your first impression in real life to be one of disappointment? Be honest about who you are. Can I just pause here with a question? Somebody is, they really, really look fifteen years younger than their age. They look twenty years younger than their age and they feel like, “I’m going to lower my amount of people that are interested in me because they judge me by the number age, and not how they would see me when they actually see how I look,” and they struggle with that. I know very, very integrity-based people who change their age from that. Tell me what you think about that. I mean, you’re starting on a lie and also a very good friend of mine is Maria Avgitidis who’s one of the leading matchmakers in New York, and every Wednesday, she does Ask the Matchmaker on Instagram where she answers these questions. Someone asked that exact question this week. They were like, “I look seventeen years younger so I’m calling myself this age.” She replied saying, “I’ve just looked at your pictures. You don’t look that age.” I think that’s the tricky thing. People think they look a certain age. I mean, how do you decide what age you actually look? In reality, again, you’re setting yourself up for a really awkward conversation at some point. You’re either going to turn up and they think that immediately they’re like, “That person lied about their age.” Even if you do actually look the age, I mean, why would you want to pretend to be that much younger? If they’re matching with, it depends, doesn’t it? If it’s someone actually your age who then is like, “You’re same age as me. I thought you were fifteen years younger. I will still carry this on.” I mean, one of the reasons the age is important is in terms of social shared jokes and shared cultural references, right? The reason I wouldn’t date someone fifteen years younger than me is most of my cultural references won’t make sense to them, and this is why it blows my mind when people try to date someone who is significantly younger than them, because I kind of think, “You need to be in that shared space.” A big part of partnership is actually just being in the same place in your life and understanding each other’s lives, right? I think that by lying about your age, then it’s going to get very confusing if you all having to try and pretend that you’re fifteen years younger when you don’t understand half of the references. Good point. I mean, I think that there are intergenerational relationships that work wonderfully, and it’s a spice for people that they’re like entering a new land of the other person’s culture, but I think the point that you’re making, it’s almost like a metaphor for a mistake people make in dating which is, “I’m going to be what I think you want,” and then ultimately you’re going to have to see that that’s not who I am. That’s my interpretation of what you wanted. I’ve wasted a lot of time finding someone who’s not looking for someone like me.
Charly’s Fire
It’s so essential. My dear friend, Hara Marano who’s the editor–at-large of Psychology Today says there are three Cs when it comes to making a choice about the relationship. The first is character, the second is character, and the third is character, and I really agree with that. Charly, you’ve shared so many wonderful things, and I have one other question for you. You are obviously someone who gets on fire about different things. You’re obviously so passionate about different subjects. You’re an entrepreneur and you’re an athlete and you’re visionary and you’re a humanitarian. What these days is kind of like giving you the most fire? What’s the thing that you’re kind of most excited about in your life, your work life, your personal life? What’s the most exciting to you now? It’s quite a big question, isn’t it. What am I most excited about at the moment? I’m a massive feminist. I’m a huge feminist. Anyone that’s watching the video of this recording, I have a big picture of Ruth Bader Ginsburg behind me who I just think is the world’s most incredible woman, and there are lots of Brits who have never heard of her. Literally, her entire story, I find so inspirational. I think for me, the thing that’s getting me most excited is really seeing equality in action. I think we are getting to a point. I mean, we’re still not there and this isn’t just women. This is the whole LGBTQ community. It does feel like in the last five years, we’re really starting to see steps have been formed in terms of equality, and particularly racial equality in the last year with everything that’s happened in the States. I feel like there are conversations happening that weren’t happening even twelve months ago, and I think that it’s awful the situations that have happened to get us to this situation where we’re actually talking about things. What I like is that these topics are repeatedly coming up first and foremost. I don’t know if anyone follows soccer. I’m not a football fan. Obviously, Britain is huge for its football but the British team, the English team have been taking a knee in the tournament, and you’ve got some of our politicians refusing to watch the football because they’re so offended by it. I mean, they are racist. I’m sorry. You’re a racist if you’re that offended by someone taking a knee, but it’s really interesting because the main demographic that watch that sport in the UK are not educated. They’re not people who will have these conversations about racial equality. They’re not people who this would have been a topic on the agenda for, but they see their idols taking a knee and I can’t stand football, but actually something like that, I just think is so powerful because these are not people who listened to scholars or politicians. They don’t tune into radio broadcasts talking about these topics but they’re tuning into the football. They’re coming away and talking about race. At the moment, obviously, this is where we’re recording in two days’ time during the European final. The team that has got to that final, I think 8 out of the 11 would not be on the team if it weren’t for immigration and that’s a huge deal. As they say in Hamilton, “Immigrants, we get the job done.” I say that as a half Romanian Brit and I love that. I love that people are saying, “Look, all these racist people in my country who were voted for Brexit in the last five years are suddenly going, “Hang on. Actually, we need Europeans in this country because we wouldn’t have a football team without them.” That’s what I’m passionate about actually is working out, how do you inform people who are not as well-educated, who are not as well-informed? Because I feel like we live in an age where and we’ve seen this with the elections on both sides of the Atlantic where the uneducated and the misinformed can be really used as tools by nasty higher powers. Actually, finding ways to communicate with them on Cambridge Analytica or on Facebook, and finding ways to show them simple messages, that for me is really powerful. Taking the knee at sports events is a way to do that. That’s wonderful. You know, for me, it’s just been such a painful polarization to witness in my country, and hearing this perspective of people’s having their eyes opened who wouldn’t have otherwise, that’s very reassuring to me and I haven’t thought of it in that way. Thank you for that. It’s tricky, isn’t it? Because we live in our own bubbles. I imagine you live in a very similar liberal bubble to the one that I live in where our social media becomes an echo chamber because you’re only hearing stuff that you believe, too. We saw this really happen 4 or 5 years ago with the Brexit vote, where everyone that was voting to stay in the EU just thought that would be a landslide vote because that’s all we had heard and seen, and then suddenly on the day, it was 48% of the country believed the same as I did and 52 did not. Even if those 52 didn’t necessarily know what they were voting for, it was heartbreaking. It really was and I think that was the first time that a lot of my generation, in particular, really realized, “Hang on, we’re living in this echo chamber.” Particularly, I live in London. I live in the capital city. We’re in this very liberal bubble and the rest of the country does not believe the same as we do, and I think that’s been a real eye-opener.
Important Links:
- Charly Lester
- Deeper Dating
- DeeperDating.com
- The Dating Awards
- Lumen
- Survivors Manchester
- RealMe
- DeeperDatingPodcast.com
- Maria Avgitidis
- Hara Marano
- Ruth Bader Ginsburg
- @CharlyLester – Twitter
- @Charly.Lester – Instagram
Freedom Versus Intimacy: How To Have Both
The Intimacy Skills That Let You Have Both

Conflicting Poles
Let’s jump right into this incredibly rich and important, and kind of universal subject, which is the tension between the parts of us that want freedom and space, and the parts of us that want intimacy and closeness, and connectedness, and bondedness. This is such a rich subject because both parts need room, but it’s a complicated, complicated thing. We’re going to talk about how to find ways to hold both parts of yourself, and to kind of extract the wisdom from each of those two sides, and help the more immature parts to kind of grow up. It’s a rich journey, finding the language of honoring those two parts of ourselves and helping them grow up, and communicate and connect. I’m going to teach you some fabulous practices for doing that, but I’m going to begin by talking about this kind of rich, rich dichotomy, and how it’s affected my life, and how it’s affected the lives of so many people that I know and work with. We long for freedom and independence, but we also crave intimacy and closeness for a happy life.CLICK TO TWEETAll of us have these two different conflicting pulls and we handle them differently, or you might say two streams of wisdom and need and self, which can often be in really deep conflict. In a complicated world, which this is, or in a dysfunctional family, or just simply because it’s hard to name and identify and honor and find a language for our deepest gifts. For all of these reasons and other reasons including trauma, we end up having to choose one of those pulls over the other in ways that hurt us, and hurt our ability to love. In a moment, I’m going to talk about the value, the wisdom and the value of each of these two pulls, but first, I’m going to share something that is a really rich metaphor, and this is just a piece of LGBTQ anthropological information that’s just so rich and capture so much. This is from Will Roscoe‘s book from 1998 called Living The Spirit, which speaks about LGBTQ, two-spirit Native Americans. It’s just rich with really fascinating material, but in many indigenous cultures, LGBTQ people were considered, in some ways, the holder of sacred ritual, because one of the definitions of what sacred means is having each of your feet in a different world and being able to hold that. They felt that LGBTQ people were able to do that with the masculine and feminine. Often, these children, these two-spirit children were cultivated for roles as shamans or ritual holders, or just very particular kind of mystical roles in the tradition, and this is very, very universal. Christian de la Huerta‘s book Coming Out Spiritually is just a very rich description of this, across many indigenous cultures. It’s amazing stuff. Anyway, a separate story, but what they would do is they would take an area of brush. In that area of brush, they would have a bow and arrow, and they would have a basket. The child that they were wondering about, if this child is two-spirit, they would set the brush on fire, and the child had to go in and either take the bow and arrow….it could only take one thing, so if the boy took the basket, that boy was considered probably two-spirit. If the girl took the bow and arrow, she would probably be considered two-spirit. Why do I tell this story? Because it’s the experience of living in a world where you don’t get both, and it’s like there’s a fire, and you only get to take the one that means the most to you, and the other you have to give up. All of us kind of have a predilection, or I don’t know about all of us, but many of us have a predilection wherein freedom has to come first. It has to come first. For others of us, what has to come first is connection. In a dysfunctional situation or just being raised not to understand the richness of these two qualities, we often feel like we don’t get to hold both, so we have to choose the one we need the most to survive. This is true in so many different ways and this exercise of holding both that I teach. This concept of holding conflicting Core Gifts, conflicting deep parts of you is something I’m going to be talking about in many different ways, but I chose one which is this one of freedom or the desire to connect.
Freedom And Intimacy: A connection can be the enemy of freedom. So it’s difficult to have that gift of freedom being so important because often we think we’re flawed in our ability to love.
Need For Freedom
I’m going to talk a little bit about each one. I think that people who have this deep need for freedom carry a particular pain in them, because they’ve had to say no to connection to maintain that sense of freedom. When your survival depends on having that freedom, and that freedom, that sense of separation or integrity or dignity of self, or if you grew up in an environment where there was emotional abuse and manipulation, maybe your survival was saying, “No. I’m not going to merge in this family. I am not going to fully join this family, because it would mean the annihilation and the suffocation of my individuality, of my truth, of my clarity, of my freedom.” We learn then in those cases, in deep, deep ways, that connection can be the enemy of freedom. It can be the enemy of autonomy. It’s difficult to have that gift of freedom being so important because often, we think we’re flawed in our ability to love, “What is wrong with me that I can’t love like other people? What is this call to freedom? What is this need for space that I have that has made me lose relationships, that has made me run, that has made me flee, that has made me separate?” I know a story of a woman who kind of had that tendency and had also a lot of consciousness. She and a man were in love with each other, so they decided that they were going to get married, but she let him know from the beginning that she had a part that could make no eternal promises forever. She had a suitcase, which was her leaving suitcase. She had it packed and she said to him, “I love you. I want to commit to you, but I need this suitcase because I cannot promise you that at some point I don’t want to leave.” Amazingly, you know, he knew that she really loved him, and I guess he had just a lot of spaciousness. That suitcase remained there for decades and they remained together, but she needed the suitcase. For me, I used to wonder why I couldn’t sleep close to anybody for more than a few minutes. I would start to feel kind of claustrophobic. I would need space, and I thought that this was a fear of intimacy. I later learned that highly sensitive people often need that extra space in bed, and that need for a space marked so much of why I could not find a relationship for so many years, because I didn’t know how to honor this odd and strange need for space that made no sense and made me feel really kind of guilty. It wasn’t until I learned to say, “I need space,” which was not easy, was just incredibly, incredibly hard. We don’t realize that our problem was not fear of intimacy but our language of intimacy.CLICK TO TWEETMy mom is a very, very amazing woman. She’s a 92-year-old street artist, Holocaust survivor, but we’ve had to work on this issue because I have felt in my life that it was sometimes hard to be close to her, because I felt like I couldn’t breathe, because her relationship to space was different than mine. It took me so long to realize that this was not fear of intimacy. It was my language of intimacy. I’ll never forget that time that I was able to get past my guilt and kind of self pathologizing and say, “Mom, I’m feeling like I can’t breathe.” Somehow there is not enough space around me in this conversation, and I need more space because I’m not happy in it now, and I’m wanting to pull away. This was just such a great thing because of all the growth, she was able to say, “Oh, yeah. I get that. I’m being kind of pressury. I’m just going to lay back and give you space.” Anyway, this was kind of like a path out of a cage that I had been in for a really long time, and I’ve had to do this endlessly with my husband to let him know ways in which I just needed space because that was the language of my being. When I couldn’t do that, my deep insights knew that they would not be protected, so I created what’s called a primitive defense, which is a wall. I wouldn’t let closeness in or I just kind of was gravitating again and again toward unavailable people, because I could breathe with them and with someone who was just available and there, I would start to feel like I couldn’t breathe, but as I learned to treasure this need for a space, that began to all change for me. So many people I think have a passion for freedom, and what those people, what us people need to do who have that is to learn to honor that language of a need for freedom, and not so quickly call it pathology but call it space. Call it the need for space, and when that’s honored and dignified, it’s a very, very different experience. The poet Rilke talked about this in a really interesting way. He said, “An artist needs to feel like they can walk miles and miles and miles in their own internal world without having to be in touch with anybody or in contact with anybody during that time.”Need For Space
There are other pieces here in addition to the freedom piece, the space piece. There’s the ambition piece, people who are on fire in ambitious ways who need the space to be able to kind of like be on fire with the arc of their passions and their ambitions, another thing that needs to be really treasured and honored. When we can do that, because often, you know, we’ve got this one thing that we pick out of the fire, and it’s the thing that we most are organized to need, but then we lose the other. As we learn to claim and honor that kind of more primary or dominant need, then there’s space to be able to see its complement, and until we see its complement, until we see the opposite part, we’re going to be victims of clumsy compromises that we have to make. We’re going to shut people out. We are going to feel blocked. We are going to have problems loving ourselves, and we will either find ourselves, again and again, doing those acts of either suppression of self or acting out of self in a not very helpful, wonderful way.
Freedom And Intimacy: All of us have these two different conflicting poles, and we handle them differently. We end up having to choose one of those poles over the other in ways that hurt us and our ability to love.

Holding Freedom And Space
Now I’m going to lead you in an exercise that I adore to help you be able to do this. I call it holding both, and I’ve taught this in I think one other episode in the past, but I’m going to share it now because it’s so connected to this. I’m going to ask you to do a visualization with me, and the thing that I’ll say first about visualizations is don’t worry if your capacity to visualize is like Swiss cheese, filled with holes. Mine is – don’t worry if you focus somewhere else, you lose focus. I do. It’s okay. What you just want to do is have those kinds of sweet moments where you’re there and you’re present and enjoy those moments, and those moments, if you do this with heart, you will have those moments and that will carry you, so don’t worry about visualizing perfectly or anything like that. Sloppy spiritual practice, I am a huge, huge champion of that. So, okay, I’d like you to close your eyes if you can, only if you can. We’re going to start together with one of these qualities. Let’s imagine that you are a parent and you’re sitting down, and you’ve got these two children. Let’s just start with the child who needs freedom, and who even unconsciously pushes things away that in any way encroach upon that sense of freedom and autonomy and space. Just picture that part of you because we all have that part of us, a part that needs that space, and has had pain in the world because it hasn’t gotten that. It hasn’t known how to ask for it, and maybe has had to push love and intimacy away because it didn’t have words to speak its truth and its boundaries. Picture this child of yours, the child for whom freedom comes first, and look at their face. See if you could let yourself see their beauty just like, you know, this beautiful quote by Edward Hallowell, “The child who needs your love is not the child you’ve pictured you should have. It’s the child who’s right in front of you right now.” This is the child who’s right in front of you right now. It’s the part of you that has to be able to breathe and have space and freedom. Now imagine that child sitting on your knee, one knee you pick. Your arm is around this child and you’re just letting them be them, and you’re thinking of what it’s going to be like for them to make their way in the world with this particular beautiful and complicated gift. Just have your arm around this kid. You’re not trying to change them or help them grow or shift. You just have your arm around them, and you love them, and you’re thinking about them. Now imagine the child for whom connection comes first, the child who will give up pieces of themselves for closeness and sweetness and goodness and connectedness. Look at this child’s face. Look at the beauty in this child’s face, and the hurt in this child’s face that they have incurred. Let this child come sit on your other knee and put your arm around this child. Think about both the pain and the beauty this child is going to face in their life journey. Now, just imagine. All you have to do is imagine that your arms are around both of these children and you’re holding them both. You’re not doing anything to fix or help or anything. You’re just holding them both as these kind of amazing beings who have a path ahead of them, and they’re your children. Just hold them and feel what it’s like to hold both. Just hold both. Take as long as you want with this. You could pause the recording if you like. Imagine what it would be like for you because you are the parent. You are the primary caretaker of both of these parts of you. Imagine what it would be like to live this way, kind of holding both like that kind of very spacious and aware kind of parent who’s maybe a little bit wry, but also very loving and just seeking reality, and seeing the differentness of their children. Just stay with that experience. Just loving both of them fully and just holding them both. With that experience, just slowly come back and open your eyes. I am so excited for you to think about your journey. I’m excited for all of us. I’m excited for me. Think about our journey as we grow in our ability to give language and dignity to those two parts of ourselves in our relationships. How amazing that will be. Thank you so much for listening to this episode, and you can find a full transcript at DeeperDatingPodcast.com. I look forward to connecting with you on the next episode.Watch the episode here:
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In this Deeper Dating Q& A episode, listeners bring their most important questions about love, sex, dating, and relationships to Ken and get his direct personal advice. Today, we’ll talk about really liking someone, but still feeling blocked, what to do when you and your partner have different life goals, building a family of creation with friends, how to develop self-love, and much more. —Table of Contents
- The Evolutionary Process Of Self-Honoring
- Understanding Our Inner Restrictions
- Finding And Building Community As A Single Person
- Finding The Balance In A New Relationship
- The Interdependence In Loving The Self And Others
- The Joys Of Experiencing Our Core Gifts
Deeper Dating Q&A: Expert Advice For All Your Questions About Love, Dating And Sex

The Evolutionary Process Of Self-Honoring
So let’s jump in. Someone, who I’m going to call L, for the first letter of their name, called in and asked me this question. She said that she had to take care of her paraplegic father herself as a child, as well as raise her younger children, and she’s a very caring person, but she does not want to have children, but her boyfriend does have children, and this is a real dilemma for her, and she called in to ask how to handle this situation. I want to use this question to talk about all of those kinds of situations that we enter into where we meet somebody who’s really wonderful, really lovely, but there are things that are difficult. Maybe it’s a physical thing, a part of them that you’re just so not attracted to, or maybe it’s their politics, or maybe it’s that they have children and you don’t want children, or they don’t want children and you do want children. Any of these kinds of things that it’s just kind of so universal this experience. My broad general comment is this. Love is built to turn us inside out, to help us become the people we are meant to be, but that does not mean losing our authentic truth, and what’s right for us and what isn’t right, and both of those things are true, and both need to be honored. This is a kind of evolutionary journey. I’ve worked with so many people who I have just deeply respected their ability to hold both sides of this. The part that said, “No, this is not right for me,” and the part that said, “I’m falling in love with this person. I’m having these really deep feelings, and I love this person, or I’m growing to love this person, or so much is right that I have never had be right before in a relationship. What do I do?” I want to say that the people whose kind of process I’ve honored and appreciated, and respected the most are the people who hold both of those truths, and stay in the presence of the relationship until an answer becomes clear, because what’s going to happen is over time, one of those sides will become ascendant. Either the person will become more beautiful, the relationship will become more beautiful, to the point where you say, “I’m going to give up this expectation or this want,” or that expectation or want will become so clear and feel really true that you know it’s not going to work, but love teaches us and trains us, and so often things that we think were not going to be what we want, and I am not talking about character issues because character is everything. Emotional safety is everything. I’m talking about things like them having children or not having children.
Understanding Our Inner Restrictions
Someone else left a message talking about an experience where she has found an attraction of inspiration. She’s been with this guy like five times, and there’s a kindness, a decency. She feels like she could be herself. She’s allowed to be who she is. There’s a feeling of real freedom, deep connection, mutual respect, and she’s celebrating that, and I am celebrating that with you. That is just wonderful, but she says that there’s a feeling of internal pressure that she’s experiencing that is very uncomfortable. She describes it as a sense of inner restriction. She says this guy is attractive, but she’s not insanely wildly crazy attracted to him. He definitely is attractive, but she feels the sense of inner restriction. She knows that this is probably internal stuff and she’s beginning therapy, three cheers. That is wonderful to explore this more fully. In her journey, she decided to be honest with this guy because she felt this blockage and she wanted to be authentic. She talked about this inner restriction that she was feeling. She told him that she was attracted to him and interested in him, and wanted to continue, but there was this inner restriction sense that was holding her back. He kind of pulled back after that, but they are still seeing each other. She’s concerned that she might have hurt him, that she might have hurt the relationship. Did she do the right thing by mentioning this? Even more, what to do from here on? The same lessons for deep friendship apply to deep romantic love, which is to look for the people with whom your soul feels safe.CLICK TO TWEETI think that that phrase “an inner sense of restriction” is a very powerful one and says a lot. Maybe some of you who are listening relate to those words, an inner restriction. I think that I just want to honor you for doing what you did because you needed to do that to stay real with him. I’m very curious, too, if as he began to distance himself a little bit, if you started feeling more attracted and interested, because that’s kind of a sign that this might be what I call the wave of distancing, which is what happens when we’re with an available, kind, decent person, and we’re just not used to that. That has affected decades of my life until I learned how to work through that, which I talk about in other podcast episodes. The other piece that I would say is “inner restriction.” What part of your body do you feel the restriction in? I want to say that the meat and potatoes of beautiful intimacy work is learning to work with our walls. That’s like the greatest thing of all, is to learn the language of our walls, so that we can begin to deconstruct them and protect ourselves in more conscious ways. A question here that I would love you to be able to ask yourself is this, what does that inner restriction say? What are its words if you’re going to put words on it? What part of you is it restricting? What does it need to feel better? And then some more nitty-gritty questions. When you’re with this guy, what stuff triggers that sense of inner restriction? What stuff happens that doesn’t trigger that feeling that lets you be free from it? This is a super new relationship, and you’re learning whether that sense of inner restriction is an important message of self-protection, or quite likely if it is the wave and it’s just fear, but listen to the words of the inner restriction. Let it tell you what it needs, what it wants and so important, how it wants to be handled, how it wants to be touched, how it wants to be interacted with.
Finding And Building Community As A Single Person
The next question is just such a wonderful and important one. It is from Barbara and she is 42, and she was very thankful about the work that I teach. Thank you, Barbara. She talked about wanting to build a kind of community, friendship and family, and connection as a single person. She talked about how hard that has been to do because the people she knows often don’t have time for that level of connection. She said, “You know, I do a lot of different social things, but that feeling of family is not there. That’s a very empty and sad place for me and something that’s really important for me to have. Do you have any ideas or any thoughts about that?” I have a lot of ideas and thoughts about that because it’s something I have lived through a lot. This is one thing I think. I think that the same lessons for deep friendship are the lessons of deep romantic love, which is to look for the people with whom your soul feels safe. There could be a lot of wonderful people, but you want to look for that feeling of like, “This person is gold. There is goodness here. There is a decency. There is a caring. There is creativity. There is a deep integrity.” You want to put that first and foremost. When you make that your kind of guide, you are more likely to find that kind of person. It is harder to find that kind of person with someone who is married or in a relationship and has kids. It is easier to find that with single people often, or people with more, more time on their hands. Culturally, we are given an idea of independence that fails us again and again because we are deeply interdependent. It’s a both-end thing.CLICK TO TWEETThat’s a really good and wonderful thing, and so essentially important. What I would say is that it’s not easy, but it is as doable as any other kind of relationship challenge. We learn the skills of getting out there. We notice and think about, “What have our friendships been like? What kind of people have we chosen to follow, to chase, to spend time with? Are these people who’ve deeply met our needs, or historically, are they the people who haven’t?” And then begin to rewire and look for people who are antidotal to what we maybe have done before, people who really can fill our hearts. Those are the lessons that will apply brilliantly in your search for love as well, and is it easy? Is the search for love easy? No. Does it require so much recalibration, so much of reconnecting to our heart, and our wisdom, and our inner sense of discovery, and hitting walls, and finding a way through and trying again? But what I would say to you is look in the arenas where you can find people who also are looking for that sense of family. There are organizations where you’re more likely to find that. Maybe churches or temples, or spiritual paths, or different groups that you could find. Ongoing groups that support community are wonderful ways. These are just some of the thoughts on this journey, but I just want to say this is doable. You can do this. It is preciously important, and it is profoundly connected to your search for love because it’s the same skills.Finding The Balance In A New Relationship
There was a longish question from someone who asked to be kept anonymous, but it’s a really interesting one and a really good one. It has two parts. The first part is she said that she lost her mom after a long illness when she was only twelve years old. That has made the ambiguity of early relating and early dating incredibly difficult for her, because she just wants to lock things in, to know that her heart is going to be safe, and that’s not appropriate for early dating, and that causes a lot of tension and stress, and just she doesn’t know how to handle that.
The Interdependence In Loving The Self And Others
There is a group of gay men in the New York area. They’ve created their own self-study group with deeper dating, and I’ve got two questions from that group, and I’m going to share them both because they’re great questions. The first question was around a passage that was on page 90 of my book, which says, “Popular psychology tells us we can only love others if we love ourselves first,” but the real truth is often the other way around. Until we feel seen and loved in the places we’re most vulnerable, few of us will ever be able to fully love ourselves. What he says is he says, “Speaking for myself, I’ve learned in all of these different spiritual disciplines, not to mention RuPaul, that learning to love myself needs to be an internal process that doesn’t rely on whether or not someone else happens to love me for who I am, and that many spiritual practices say this same thing. Can you reconcile these beliefs or explain your position further?” What I would say about that is that culturally, we are given an ideal of independence that fails us again and again because we are deeply interdependent. It’s a “both-and” thing. It is not an “either-or” thing, but the experience in the places where we have the hardest time loving ourselves when we have someone who can look at us and instruct us in the gift part of what we’ve been embarrassed by and ashamed of, there is nothing like that, and the task of doing that on our own is often like pulling yourself up by your bootstraps like you stay up for about one second. It is so true that we need each other to heal. Conceptually beautiful concept, love yourself first, and I am all about learning the skills of loving yourself, and it is an inside job to a really deep degree. That’s so much of what I teach with the Core Gift work, but it’s “both-and.” It is also true that we learn to love ourselves, one, by choosing people who love us in a wonderful way. That’s like maybe the greatest gift of all in our search for love is learning to choose those people. Learning to choose people only with whom our soul feels safe. So the answer here is it is so much more “both-and” than we are taught by popular psychology or many spiritual disciplines, and that’s just my take on this.The Joys Of Experiencing Our Core Gifts
The next one is around some particular exercises, which are in my book and in my courses, etc. around discovering your Core Gifts, and some of the questions that I ask in that process are, “Recall three times in your life when you felt most deeply inspired, fed, or moved in a relationship with someone,” so this person tells three very, very moving stories that kind of connect to some of the themes that we’ve been talking about in this episode. Three times in his life when he felt very vulnerable, and experienced a lot of pain, a lot of vulnerability, a lot of uncertainty, and was brave enough, first of all, to reach out to someone, even though it was hard and scary, and embarrassing. Wise enough to choose the right people, and blessed enough that he got to have this experience of in each of these cases, really being able to express his grief and his fear, and feel seen and heard, and not diminished in any way, but honored and supported. In this work of discovering your Core Gifts, we ask a series of questions. In the book and in the course, there are questions that we ask. This was under the category of discovering your Core Gifts through your joys. These were the joys that he described and he asked, “Can you give me any feedback? Are these really joys? Are there Core Gifts here in these experiences?” Here’s what I would say. Absolutely, yes. These are all situations where you were brave enough to get in touch with deep grief, trusting and beautiful enough to share it with someone, and then able to receive healing from that. That’s big stuff. Many people or most people in the world can’t do that. I just think that there’s something here about your ability to drink deeply from authentic communication, that probably has gotten you in trouble because it’s a Core Gift and it’s a very strong capacity, and made you feel misunderstood, but also has felt like a key to understanding what works for you in intimacy, because these are the gifts of someone who can share deeply and really receive the experience of being held, which I am quite certain that you’re able to give to other people as well. When we look at the things in our relationships that touch us and move us the most, they’re going to be kind of universal, but they’re also going to be kind of really individual, and out of those, we begin to name our Core Gifts, and I think these are beautiful Core Gifts that you’re describing. I have lots more questions I still need to answer. I will do that on the next Q and A episode. I thank you all for listening. Go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com to join my mailing list, and if you do, the free gift that you’ll get is actually the first two chapters of my book in which you will be able to learn how to discover and name your own Core Gifts. It was a joy to be with everybody, and I look forward to the next episode of The Deeper Dating Podcast with you.Watch the episode here:
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Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!Table of Contents
The 3 Questions That Reveal Your Deepest Intimacy Gifts
How To Claim The Power Of Your Core Gifts

Core Gifts, Explained
All of the work that I teach rests on the foundation of being able to name, discover, honor, and learn the language of our Core Gifts, and then choose situations, people, passions, and projects that feed that part of ourselves. In this episode, I’m going to teach you how you can discover your own Core Gifts. The kind of key practices, you don’t learn this in a minute, and it’s deeply kind of counterintuitive in some ways, that our greatest insecurities reveal our greatest gifts. These are practices that I’m going to teach you that will enrich your life and shift your kind of experience from that painful, crippling place that we all know so well. Where we are beholden to the eyes of the people who are looking at us and judging us, and shift that to a place where there’s a sense of a sacred self that surprises us, challenges us, challenges the world, and is generative, creative, strange, quirky, and generous. All different kinds of things that don’t necessarily make life easy, but genius domesticated is genius lost, and we need to honor those parts of ourselves.

Question For Discovering Your Core Gift
I’m going to leave this kind of like very esoteric, theoretical framework now, and I’m going to bring it down to some of these practices that I was talking about. These are some practices, these are questions you can ask yourself that you can ask yourself on a regular basis that will help you discover your Core Gifts. There are two central basic questions and this is an exercise that I teach, which is you can take two days and a journal, a phone, a tablet or anything that you can write in, and for two days, notice two things. Notice the things in your interactions with the world that hurt you, that sting you, that make you feel like you just got a paper cut, or maybe cause even deeper pain than that. Notice those things and don’t step over them so quickly and tell yourself you’re being too sensitive or just try to get rid of the pain and the suffering. Instead, ask yourself, “What hurts? Why does it hurt? Is this a hurt that I have had in my life before? What does this hurt say about what matters most to me? What does this hurt say about the things that are important?” When you answer those questions, you can ask the next question, which is, “What might be the Core Gift in this hurt that I’m experiencing?” You’re probably going to be able to figure out an answer. When you do that over the course of two days, you will find that certain themes emerge. Those themes might be a loss of connection, an unkindness, a lack of generosity, a dishonesty, and a lack of commitment. These are the kinds of things that are like fingerprints, they’re universal but they’re individual for each of us, and you will find the things that hurt and sting the most. I’m going to ask you to think, “How might these come from my deepest gifts?” The second question is, “What things fill my heart?” Like during the day, what are the things that give you a sense of peace or you get this feeling of solidity, strength, clarity, or you get a creative burst? What are the things or you feel a sense of joy or connectedness or love? What are the things, what are the environments that create that for you? With those things, I ask you not to just step over them quickly and think, “Well, that was a nice moment,” but instead to think this is a portal to my deepest roots. How might that be so, if it was so? What is it in me that is being filled with this joy, this piece, or this good feeling? What is it about what’s going on that’s making me feel these good feelings? Have I ever felt these good feelings before? What kind of things have triggered them for me? What does this say about what my Core Gift might be that is getting a little bit of a light shown on it, and it’s illumined at the moment? The happiness that we want in finding love is with someone with whom these parts of us feel safe, feel held, and feel appreciated.CLICK TO TWEETIf you take the time to think in this philosophical way, you will find the key themes that have bewildered you because you’ve said, “Why am I so sensitive? I don’t need to be this sensitive,” or maybe concerned you because the feeling of joy or peace was really great and it just felt odd or strange, and you didn’t know what to do with it. These are portals to your deepest self. When you know those Core Gifts, when you begin to put names on them, and you know, in my book and my work there, you know, I go into a lot more details about how to do that, but even with these practices, you will be able to do that. You begin to notice the themes that matter the most to you. Now, here are some other ways that you can identify your core gift. This is a great one. This is a way to identify your Core Gifts in romantic relationships and it’s this. What do you feel most timid to reveal in bed, in communication? What is the stuff that it’s like, “Oh, this is hard to share. This is hard to share.” I don’t mean experiences that you’ve had in your life that were painful or difficult or embarrassing. I mean parts of you that are just hard to share. Those are your Core Gifts. What it is is that those parts of you have an intense charge. Those are the places where you have the greatest charge because it’s where your greatest genius is. It’s where your mission is. It’s where your deepest language of self lies. The more you learn to treasure these parts of you, the more you will also learn to become so familiar with that horrible feeling of having them stepped on, neglected, denied or ignored, and that’s another act of personal greatness – is to cultivate that dignity to say, “It’s not that I’m not enough, it’s that something is happening here, that to my heart, to my soul, to my being, to my gift just doesn’t feel right. I’m going to figure out what that is, I’m going to trust it, and I’m going to honor it.” The more we do that, for those of us who are single, the more your taste in romantic partners will actually shift. This is an amazing thing. I have done this work with thousands of people and I cannot tell you how many times I have seen that happen. It’s a formula. It’s a beautiful formula that I really believe in.
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Is there chemistry? That’s a necessary question. But the bigger question lies right behind that! Because different types of chemistries lead to different futures. This is why it’s so essential to understand how your “chemistries” have guided your love life. In this episode, we’ll explore which kinds of chemistries to follow–and which to stay away from–for a happy future in love. These insights can change your entire search for love–and empower you to love yourself more deeply! —Table of Contents
- Simplest Path To Happiness In Finding Love: Ask This Question
- The Sexy But Unsafe Chemistry
- A World Full Of Possible Chemistries
Is There Chemistry? Here’s What You Need To Know


Simplest Path To Happiness In Finding Love: Ask This Question
By knowing the different types of chemistry that there are for you, you will change your future. That is what this work is all about. I’m going to talk first about the kind of chemistries that we want to look for and follow. This is something that I have talked about before. It’s a way that we can have so much more control of our search for love, and it’s by asking ourselves one question as we search for love. Let me tell you, asking this question just makes such a profound difference. It truly, truly, truly is, I think, the kind of simplest path to happiness in finding love, and that is this question and I ask it in a kind of spiritual way. I use the word soul but for you, maybe heart might be more appropriate. The question is, “Does my soul feel safe with this person?”

The Sexy But Unsafe Chemistry
If you haven’t had that yet, welcome to your future because you can choose that. It’s a little scary because you have to say no to so many people, but it’s a future that you can absolutely choose. When you make that, your question and your focus on your intention, your dating life changes on its axis. Okay, let’s talk about another kind of chemistry and that’s a chemistry that’s sexy, exciting, erotic, delicious and hot, but it’s not safe. It’s not truly safe and you feel it inside. You’re always tweaking, manipulating and trying to convince yourself that you’re just being too sensitive or you should just be more detached, and you shouldn’t worry about that and let that go. You’re always doing that to convince yourself that that weird unsafe feeling where your feet are touching the ground in this relationship, this sense of shakiness or not rightness, you’re doing all these things to convince yourself that it’s really okay. That convincing really translates into, “I’m not enough and I have to fix myself.” There are so many different kinds of beautiful chemistries in this world, but we need to develop a taste for them.CLICK TO TWEETRemember some kind of maybe bad boy, bad girl, bad person, kind of sexy-sexy, cocky, not so friendly, not so nice, or wonderful and glorious and then disappears, or wonderful and glorious and then just doesn’t treat you well, or is wonderful and glorious in there but they’re not so honest. Those kinds of relationships where your feet don’t feel safe on the ground, but this person is sexy and you’re desirous. Also, they’re available and they’re there. Maybe they love you and that is breathtakingly hard to say no to. Just remember those kinds of experiences, because those kinds of experiences where you can’t say in an essential way, “My soul feels safe with this person in terms of their integrity, their decency, their availability, their solidity.” The thing is that those relationships often feel so sexy. That’s this unconscious thing of looking for someone who is just doesn’t love you fully, which increases their sense of value. They must be pretty special because you’re obviously not special as them, and decreases your sense of value. This is a rich another kind of the point. If you find in a relationship again and again that you were feeling insecure like a deep insecurity, very often it’s because the other person is not safe, does not fully value you for who you are, but you don’t translate it. Often we don’t translate that into, “This person is not treating me the way I want to be treated. There’s something off here. There’s something not right. There’s something that doesn’t align with my values.” Instead, we think, “Why am I feeling so insecure? I have to get over this insecurity.” Often, that triggered sense of insecurity comes from another person’s unavailability or unsafety.
A World Full Of Possible Chemistries
There is not just one chemistry and there are not two chemistries. There is a world full of possible chemistries, and some of them are highly erotic and romantic, some start out gently erotic and romantic but grow, some start out erotic and then turn into friendships, some touch different parts of our being. There are so many different kinds of chemistries. Just like we’re discovering that there are so many different kinds of gender identities. This makes me think of a beautiful book by Michael Cunningham called A Home at the End of the World. I tell this story sometimes. This boy is in front of the mirror and he’s making up his face, and half of his face has shaving cream. He’s got this guy thing going on. This man thing that he’s imagining or emulating, and then he puts on makeup on the other side of his face, and he just looks at himself. He says, “I didn’t know that there were so many different kinds of beauties that could exist in this world.” What I want to say is that there are so many different kinds of beautiful chemistries in this world, but we need to develop a taste for them. This is something else that I think is really important to know. It’s something I talk about a lot. When you’re with someone who is safe, available, decent and just present, you might find this strange experience of your desire plummeting and then thinking, “Oh my God, I guess I just wasn’t attractive enough.” You think, “I am so superficial. The people who are really good for me, I just run from them,” but whatever it is, you kind of like leave because you don’t want to hurt them anymore and you realize you’re not interested. What this is, is something that I call “the wave” which so many of us have, which is this wave of disinterest, judgment, boredom or desire to get away, or suffocation that happens when we find someone who’s just plain available. When we are used to deriving our spice and our chemistry from people who are not that available, there is a shift that needs to happen. What I would say is that wave is actually a spasm of fear. Like a wave, it hits us and then it goes away. If you are changing your kind of path of chemistries for people who are available and decent, and make your soul feel safe, understand that that white-hot roller-coastery sexiness will go away and will need to be replaced with a new kind of sexiness, which is the deep revealing of who you are and being met, held and caught by the other person. When you can reveal that romantically, sexually, spiritually, and the other person is there for you, it’s just the most incredible experience. For those of us who are used to pursuing these chemistries of the rollercoaster, this will take a little bit of getting used to. It’ll take a little bit of our friends reminding us of how wonderful this person is or telling us, “You fuck this up and I’ll kill you.”
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Conscious love, conscious business, conscious spirituality! In this episode, I had the privilege of interviewing Tami Simon, the brilliant, soulful and very authentic CEO of Sounds True; the world’s largest living library of transformational teachings to support and accelerate spiritual awakening and personal transformation. For me, this stunning interview was a spiritual experience. Not to be missed! —Table of Contents
- Realizing The Desire Of Sharing Spiritual Teachings
- Opening The Door To Financial Abundance
- Stepping Into The Magic Of Life
- Inner MBA Program
Love, Spirit And The Entrepreneur’s Journey: An Interview With Tami Simon


Realizing The Desire Of Sharing Spiritual Teachings
Sure. Well, I left college really on a search, and when I went to Sri Lanka originally, I was introduced to meditation in a ten-day bootcamp style with someone named S. N. Goenka who’s a Burmese meditation master. He was teaching in-person. For people who know of his work, it’s kind of a big deal because he’s such a legendary figure. There he was. Ten days you wake up at 5:00 in the morning and you go to sleep at 10:00 PM, and you meditate all day for ten days in what’s known as noble silence. You’re not speaking at all during this ten-day period. At the end of my first ten-day retreat, it’s kind of like the lights went on inside me, in a way, for the first time. Afterwards, I went and I spoke to a professor. I was staying at his home. He had been at Swarthmore College one year on a Fulbright scholarship. When he left with his family, I left with him to go to Sri Lanka, but he looked at me when I come out of the ten-day retreat and he said, “Your eyes look so different, Tami. There’s suddenly this kind of light in them that I always knew was there, but now I can see it and feel it and sense it,” and I could feel that inside myself. I don’t really know how else to describe it but it was a quality of homecoming and the lights going on. Then I decided I want to do another one of these ten-day retreats so I’m going to travel up to Goenka Center in India. As I was traveling, I stopped at various Buddhist temples on the way, and this is to answer your question. What I found myself doing was lying in the dirt at these temples outside, and they would have these full moon ceremonies so people would stay up all night and chant at various temples. I would lie down in the dirt with my arms outstretched in a full prostration and said, “I give my life to these teachings. I give my whole life to it. This is it. Everything I have. All the cells in my body, may you be used in service of bringing as many people as possible to this type of inner discovery.” It started with those kinds of prayers but of course, that’s not a business. That’s a 21-year-old kid lying in the dirt in India, praying. You know what I mean. I just have to back up here for a minute and say that that is incredibly beautiful and incredibly personal, and thank you for sharing it. It’s very moving.
Opening The Door To Financial Abundance
Yeah. Well, this is what I’ve come to see at this moment in time and it’s about our life being for others. We think we want these things for ourselves, and I think when we have that kind of viewpoint, if that’s what’s leading the charge, I don’t think that evokes the same kind of magic if you will, as when we devote ourselves to other humans, just to others, to life. When we say, “I am here as a servant. I’m here. I want to bring love into my life so I can really love someone, so I can give all that I have to give,” which is a little different than, “So that this person will admire me and do all these things for me.” A healthy partnership can be your greatest source of healing, energy, and inspiration for your work.CLICK TO TWEETIt’s like, “I want a creative business life where I’m bringing my best talents to lift up our suffering world in every way I can. I want to bring so much value to other people. I want to deliver value, value, value to others in the ways that are most meaningful, that lights me up and where I see other people come alive from my generosity.” I think when we lead with that kind of spirit, and not just in words, it’s actions. It’s actions we take every day to go out of our way for other people, really. I think when we do that, we become so magnetic. You know, you can’t keep people or projects away from us. Two questions here. One question is what about the people who are listening and saying, “I give, I give, I give, I give, I give, I give but I’m still not in a relationship. I’m in a relationship with people who I give to” or “I give, I give, I give but I’m not making much money.” They say, “Yeah, I love that service concept but there’s a depletion that comes because I’m not taking. I’m not receiving.” Well, you have to give to yourself too. You’re a part of the equation, and so it’s not just out there. There has to be a sense of energetic balance in the whole thing. Which is where your journey started with someone saying you should give to you. That was kind of the first step there. Yeah. Treat yourself like the number one person you’re responsible for, but that’s still a different lens that I think a lot of times, especially when people approach business, they are really looking at the financial gain picture that is leading the picture. I just don’t think that works if you’re trying to create a business with soul. If you’re trying to create a business that you know is filled with goodness and meaning, I don’t think that can come first. I think the value you’re bringing to other people comes first. I’m trying to not make it quite the same in the relationship world because I don’t think necessarily the business and the relationship thing are you know. I haven’t thought about that this much, Ken, so I don’t want to just group them together. That feels very clear to me in the business world. In the relationship world, what I see is just an infinity symbol, and this notion of utter reciprocity and generosity between you and another person where the outpouring of that is something that benefits your community. I can feel that. That makes sense to me.
Stepping Into The Magic Of Life
That’s going to be the medium, stepping into the magic of life. I think of those kids who are really good with jump rope, that could just step into this amazing kind of jump rope thing. They know when to step in, but I would invite everybody now to take a moment and imagine what would that mean for you, and I’m going to do the same, to step into the magic of life and have that be the way we approach our search for a career, our search for love. What if we did it by stepping into the magic of life? I encourage people to pause the recording if you like. I’m going to take a moment, but I just think that that was pure magic and I adore it. Well, also even this notion of stepping into it right here together, we could just fall into this very moment, which is this very moment right here. You and I, Ken, new friends. New friends who value each other and who see a kind of preciousness and this timing of the intersection of our lives together, whatever comes from it. We feel that, “Oh, my gosh,” wherever the listener is right now, right here, tuning into the quality of something like light in the room. What is light? What is it? Feeling or breathing, the miracle, the unbelievable savoring miracle of a full inhale, just take it in. Feel it, whatever part of your body, it touches your belly, your chest, your nose. I mean, this is exquisite. You don’t need a partner or a business or anything out of this moment of the inhale, the top of the inhale, the fullness. How full we are each with life at the top of the inhale, bursting? Then the exhale itself, which is a huge release and letting go, and then the interesting space at the end of the exhale, which has a kind of openness to it, no boundaries to it. That’s just one conscious breath, savored, enjoyed, supremely delighted in. I think when we have this kind of spirit and we keep living with that sense of utter appreciation, and it can even be something hard you discover inside in your experience when you’re breathing. Even if you hit some heartache or something, even that has a richness and intensity, and it’s sort of deeply fascinating, even if it’s difficult, and sometimes it can be difficult, but I think when we have that kind of attitude and we’re in present time, that’s where there’s so much power to actually celebrate all that we already have right here. May all the cells in our body serve others and bring them to inner discovery.CLICK TO TWEETWell, that was a beautiful spiritual ice cream sundae for everybody. Yeah and I think sometimes, we have our ice cream sundaes and then we put them aside, and we’re like, “Now the search is back on and the me-show is back. Like, that’s great. That’s my spiritual sundae,” which is okay. I mean, that’s over here when I do my practices or whatever but then it’s up to me to manifest this thing. What I’m actually offering is this idea that we can live more like that, and when we do, we find really a lot of opportunities are naturally coming to us. First of all, you become very magnetic. This is what I was saying to other people. If you’re like, “Well, people don’t seem very attracted to me or interested in me or dah, dah, dah.” Well, someone who’s in the present, who’s appreciating the sky, suddenly people are like, “I’d like to be sitting next to that person. I’d like to be in their presence, in the field of their being, because being around them is so calming. It’s so loving. It’s so warm. I love being near them.” I mean, we love being near people like that. I love being near people like that. Absolutely. It’s almost like being next to a fire when it’s slightly cold out or something. You’re warmed by such a person. In terms of relationships, it’s a way that people just want to be around you. “I want to be around you.” Then I think in terms of creative business life, I know I love having people on our team who are very open. Their minds are open and they are really present because what I know happens is that the best ideas come from working with people like that. They listen, listen, listen and suddenly, they say this thing and I’m like, “That’s cool.” I know there’s kind of enough space for the good new stuff to come and be part of the conversation. We’re not just recycling what other companies have done and other people have done, because we’re looking outside in a desperate search to copy the moneymaker out there. No, we’re listening. What’s ours to do? What’s the part we can contribute? There’s an openness to receive that.
Inner MBA Program
Oh, saying no is so hard and so liberating and so important, so thank you for making space for that too. Tami, you’ve shared all these practices and these concepts that are just delicious and powerful and revelatory. Can you talk a little bit about this Inner MBA Program that you have created for people who might want to learn more of these tools and really apply them? Sure. Well, I think one of the things that are really important to me is that our work relationships, just like our intimate relationships, become part of our growth path as individuals. People often say that intimate relationships are the crucible for spiritual growth and development. True. Well, now we have these relationships with all these people we work with. They’re not our intimate love relationships. They’re our relationships at work. I have learned and grown so much from the people that I’ve worked with. I would go so far as to say that the workplace can be, and needs to be, a crucible for personal growth. The reason I say that is even for people who are maybe not signing on to say, “I want to do a lot of deep therapy work, et cetera.” They’re working with other people.
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- Tami Simon
- Sounds True Podcast: Insights at the Edge
- N. Goenka
- Yogananda
- Thich Nhat Hanh
- SoundsTrue.com
- InnerMBAProgram.com
- https://www.soundstrue.com/
- https://innermba.soundstrue.com/
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- https://twitter.com/soundstrue/
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About Tami Simon

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Sometimes life and love just feel too hard. Sometimes it seems like self-love has gone into hiding. In this episode, I’ll teach you a few powerful tools for reclaiming that beautiful experience of self-love, even in the most challenging situations.Table of Contents
- Tools For Developing Rock Spaces
- Feeling Reduced And Minimized
- Fear Of Other Peoples’ Opinions
- The Need To Toughen Up
How To Reclaim Self-Love When It Goes Away
How To Find Your Sense Of Self
All of us have times when we feel like we just can’t navigate the complexities of love, where we feel like we’re losing ourselves. In this episode, I’m going to teach you some powerful tools to reclaim yourself at those times when love and relationships just seem too complicated. Stay tuned to this episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast. — Hello and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page, and I’m a Psychotherapist. I’m the author of the book Deeper Dating and the Cofounder of DeeperDating.com, which is a site where single people can meet in an environment that is fun, inspiring, kind and respectful. Today, I’m going to teach some tools for handling those times we feel we just can’t navigate love and relationships. This week and every episode, I’m going to share the greatest tools that I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing, and heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love, which are the greatest skills of all for a happy life. If you want to learn more about the deeper dating path to real intimacy, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. You can sign up for my mailing list, get free gifts, and see transcripts of every episode. I also just want to say that everything I’m going to share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice, and if you’re experiencing any serious psychological symptoms, please seek professional help. Of course, if you like what you’re learning here, I’d love it if you could subscribe and leave me a review. Thank you so much for that. You can stand on a rock in this moving current of river called life and still have yourself.CLICK TO TWEETToday, I want to speak about the experience of not having a self or more specifically, having a hole where our sense of healthy self is supposed to be. It’s not a good feeling. It’s something we think we shouldn’t have, but it’s so much of what we do end up having in the course of this strange life that we live and in the course of learning the skills of love. There are pockets where we just don’t know, and even worse than just not knowing, there’s a “missingness” inside. Today I’m going to offer some tools for healing those places of “missingness” inside, of emptiness, of feeling like, “I just can’t do this. I’m missing a piece of me. There’s something defective in me. There’s something broken in me. I don’t have the skills.” I think in the face of this strange and treacherous life, and in the face of the strange and treacherous, often, experience of intimacy, and the mystery of what happens in love, we’re so often confronted with that experience. I think as we grow, we learn the skills to lose ourselves less. Even when we don’t know who we are, even when we’re bewildered and in pain and stuck, we learn these skills. I think of it as trying to cross a wide river and that experience like, “There’s no way I can do this. I can’t do it. There’s no place for me to stand. I can’t get through.” In my life, there have been so many of those times and there still are many of those times, but especially when I was younger, that terrible place of, “I just don’t know. I don’t have the tools. I don’t have the ground to stand on.” After so many experiences of confronting that very painful place, and finding the tools of discovering myself, the image is like this river that I need to cross and all of a sudden, there’s a rock underneath my feet. I can stand on that rock in this moving current of river and still have myself. What I want to teach today is some wonderful tools for how to build those rock experiences, these rocks that we can stand on in the river of this mystery of love and life, and feel a sense of wholeness and connectedness.Tools For Developing Rock Spaces
I don’t know and I don’t think any of us ever have an experience where the path across that river becomes one that we could just simply walk across. There are these places where the water is rushing and we can’t get through. If we’re lucky, there’s a rock that we could step on to of a sense of self, a memory of self, a tool that we’ve learned, something that we can do so that we can move further on the river, but there’s always this rushing river of not having ground to stand on and not knowing ourselves. That’s just so much a part of being human. By the experience of self-honoring, we can cultivate the experience of having rocks beneath our feet that we can step on in love. I’m going to share some tools for developing those kinds of rock spaces. I’m going to ask you to remember times when there wasn’t ground for you to stand on, that you figured out a way to create ground to stand on. That became a rock for you. What kind of wisdom tool that you had in your life? Guaranteed, every one of you has those. When we see what those are, they come together to form a mission of our deepest life lessons, the things that get us through the river of life with wisdom. I’m just going to share a few that I know, and that many people I know have experienced. I just want you to remember and we’re going to start with that experience of, “There’s not a rock for me to stand on here.” There’s not a steppingstone. There’s just a sense of not rightness, not “okayness”, emptiness, “flawedness”, brokenness. Have you ever been in a relationship and had a really bad feeling of suffocation, and then felt like, “What’s wrong with me? Why am I feeling suffocated? I should really be fine in this relationship. My partner is fine. Why do I feel like I can’t breathe? Why do I feel like there’s no air for me? Why do I feel like I want to flee?” Maybe a feeling of numbness where the other person is feeling, but you are kind of feeling nothing, and you feel bad that you’re feeling nothing. These are places that have been groundless places for me in my own intimacy journey. I’ve had to learn such important things about those places. Have you ever experienced those things? Highly sensitive people often feel a sense of suffocation or needing space.CLICK TO TWEETThe feeling of suffocation in an intimate relationship for me is a big one. When I learned about Elaine Aron‘s work with highly sensitive people, and I learned that highly sensitive people often feel that kind of sense of suffocation or needing space. That was really helpful for me to begin to understand who I was, when I realized and I could admit that my suffocation was a sign. It’s pretty obvious but to me, it just felt like a defect. It was a sign that I needed more space. Something was happening inside me or in my interaction with the other person where I literally didn’t have enough space, and I needed to somehow reclaim that sense of space. That insight gave me ground to stand on instead of just feeling like I am just so dysfunctional with love. That’s one example.Feeling Reduced And Minimized
Have you ever felt that kind of sense of suffocation in a relationship and learned a skill, and actually through your interactions with yourself or the other person heal that, fix that and get past that? Just take a minute to think. Here’s another one. Feeling somehow “less than” because of who you are in an intimate relationship. That experience of feeling reduced, less than, minimized, maybe because you had a need that was not being met, or maybe because the other person was somehow degrading you, controlling you, somehow dishonoring you or not honoring you fully enough, or you were doing that yourself. That feeling of being less than, that horrible feeling of being less than. Have you ever experienced that and been able to get past it, get through it and get out of it?

Fear Of Other Peoples’ Opinions
When we ask that, we make room for our humanity. All of a sudden, it’s literally the feeling of ground beneath our feet. Here’s another one. What will people think of me? These are all such human ones, but I think you could sense that when you get lost in them, it’s just that feeling of a lack of ground beneath our feet. What will people think of me? The replacement for that is, what do I think of this? Whatever it is that I think or feel about this, how is that authentically a part of who I am? I remember a moment in therapy. I was with a therapist who, ultimately, I was not so thrilled with and was not a great therapist for me, but there was one thing that happened. I was in a relationship with the boss, and I talked a lot about what she thought of me and how she saw me. My therapist said to me, “Well, how do you see her?” I thought that that was a great question, but then she went further and she explained to me, “The minute you disconnect from your eyes and how you perceive the world, you will be prey to this experience of a terrible sense of vulnerability to how other people see you. The healing from that is the going back to what you see, and what you notice. The lack of being able to do that creates a vacuum inside, which always gets filled with masochistic situations where we over worry about what other people think of us.”
The Need To Toughen Up
Here’s another one. I need to toughen up. I am too sensitive. Just take a minute to think about the times that you may have felt that. What if that was replaced with, I’m actually not going to toughen up because this is how sensitive I am. This is what I feel. What if my strength was a more flexible strength that came from honoring that vulnerability, and then making choices that took care of it? Instead of trying to get rid of it, step on it, suppress it, bury it or make it tougher. It’s in that act of self-honoring, of finding the spaciousness to self-honor, the room to self-honor that so many of those deep and strange hole spots inside of us are healed and soothed and changed. That is about honoring self. That terrible painful space is about the dishonoring of self. It's in that act of self-honoring those deep and strange whole spots inside of us that we are healed, soothed, and changed.CLICK TO TWEET

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In this Deeper Dating Q& A episode, listeners bring their most important questions about love, sex, dating, and relationships to Ken and get his direct personal advice. Today, we’ll help you get past the pain of breakups, recognize attractions of deprivation more quickly, deal with painful aspects of healthy relationships, and more!Table of Contents
- Healing From Attractions Of Deprivations
- Feeling Disappointments In Our Relationships
- Unworthy Of Love
- Unhealthy Relationships
- On Again Off Again Relationships
Deeper Dating Q&A: Expert Advice For All Your Questions About Love, Dating And Sex

Healing From Attractions Of Deprivations
The first question, “Hi, Ken. My name is Jace and thank you for all your hard work. I’ve gotten a lot of value out of your book and your podcasts. A subject that I don’t think you’ve addressed yet that I’m curious about is how to heal from attractions of deprivation. Assuming we’re doing the things that you recommend doing, dating with your Core Gifts, identifying attractions of deprivation early on, etc. What I’m curious about is when an attraction of deprivation still happens, what’s your recommendation on healing from that kind of breakup? Because attaching from attraction of deprivation feels worse and more difficult than others, even while knowing it was the right decision. Do you have any insights on this?” Thank you, Jace. I think that most of us, if not all of us, who are listening now know the pain of separating from or being separated from an attraction of deprivation. It does hurt and it is really, really difficult. I just want to talk about that a little bit. I guess the first thing that I want to say is that that pain is part of the pain of loving. Somehow, I think that if we use that pain and work with it, if we grow around that pain in whatever ways that we do, it will ultimately be a foundation. It’ll be a source of wisdom. It’ll be a turning point for us in our lives. If we don’t let ourselves feel that pain and that hurt and try to grow around that, it won’t be as useful. How do you do that? How do you honor the pain and try to grow? One piece, I think, is not to do it alone, but to do it with help and support. Thích Nhất Hạnh, the brilliant Vietnamese monk who was nominated by Martin Luther King for a Nobel Peace Prize. He said, “If you take a vial of ink and you pour it into a glass, it’s going to darken the entire glass. If you pour it into a river, not very nice to the river, but if you do that, it just gets absorbed.” That is an example. That explains how it’s just too bitter and hard to hold the pain ourselves. Look for wise friends. Look for friends with whom you can talk about this not once, not twice, but as much as you need to. You might want to do some trauma-based therapies. EMDR and brain spotting, those are two very powerful ones. AEDP is another one. Somatic Experiencing is another one. I’ve used EMDR with clients a lot and found it tremendously helpful. I also think that the simple technique called EFT or tapping, which you can find, I would suggest looking at Dawson Church’s work or Nick Ortner’s work or Jessica Ortner’s work. There are lots of people on YouTube where you can learn about EFT, which is a self-soothing technique that’s very powerful and very healing around trauma.
Feeling Disappointments In Our Relationships
The next question, this person says, “I find that women, a lot of times, process through things very quickly and with men, it takes a bit more time the way that our brains are wired. If a woman is asking a question on something, it’s a bigger, heavier question of how long to give the man space. I don’t want to insult the man. I want to trust him, but I know myself, I can forget things and get to multitasking, and then not give it the attention it needs to get back to the person. Also, how not to nag like if somebody says he’s going to take out the garbage on a Tuesday and it’s Monday night. Do you wait until like 8:00 at night before you say, ‘Hey, did you take out the garbage?’ or is it better just to let the garbage be forgotten and let that person, in a manner of speaking, have that consequence? What is the best route?” She says, “In my past, I was around more immature men, and those duties would fall to me when they didn’t pick up or they didn’t do what they said they were going to do. I want to not enable somebody to treat me that way. How do you respect them and call them up higher, in a sense? I really appreciate the knowledge and wisdom you bring. You’ve helped me learn so much and I’m really grateful to you.” Thank you so much for saying that. Just a couple of thoughts on this. On one level, I think it’s a universal issue the way that we so often feel disappointment in our relationship with things that matter to us, that maybe our partner doesn’t do as well as they need to. That’s a really, really universal thing, and it is better to not nag but to share your feelings. It’s better to say what you want, why it’s important to you, if you feel let down to share that as well. I think that’s a better way to do it. I just want to back up here for a second though and say that you’ve articulated a shift that’s happened for you, which is now you are somehow with men who are more mature. I’m imagining that this guy that you’re talking about is more mature than men that you have been with before. I want to acknowledge that and congratulations on that. That is growth and progress. We get prickly around the places where there are deep wounds.CLICK TO TWEETI know for me, with my husband, when I get annoyed or impatient around things that I want him to do or think he should do or he said he would do, etc., often I am humbled by the fact that just the remembering of all the things that he does that I don’t do that well and that I forget. I think it’s always good to take a step back and think of that, too. Might this be hitting a trigger for you that’s an early old trigger, just take the time to think about this in a rational way. What are the things that he does for you? What are the things that you do? If it ends up being pretty balanced, that’s going to make you feel better right there. Think broad scale the things that he does because he just picks them up, and the things that you do that you just pick them up, but if it’s bothering you, definitely speak about it. Say what you mean and mean what you say, but don’t say it mean. I think that these kinds of sticking points are ones that we all experience and they’re like very much about a building up of wisdom. If something’s bothering you and if it has historic roots, find a way to talk about it that is not “blamey”, but is more like an “I” statement. That’s really a key here. Let us know what happens. Thank you.Unworthy Of Love
Okay, the next one. “Hey, there. I’d like to keep this question anonymous but my question to you is when you have a deep-rooted feeling of being unworthy of love, how do you make your wants and needs known without feeling like you’re going to make yourself appear less worthy because you expressed your wants and needs?” This is a beautiful, beautiful question. I think for those of us who have deep-rooted or have had deep-rooted feelings of being unworthy of love, which is actually a lot of us. When it comes time to make our wants and needs known, we don’t do it. So, three cheers for you, person who called in, because you are considering and planning to make those wants and needs known. That’s huge. That’s big. That’s really big. It’s like a breakthrough to be able to do that when you feel unworthy of love. When we do this, and it’s scary for us and it’s hard, we might feel really uncomfortable reverberations of shame or embarrassment. We might feel defenses or a kind of intense prickliness or making the assumption that your needs and wants are not going to be met. Maybe you get like a tiny indication of that that’s just not really fair to assume it, but it feels like it is and you assume you won’t get your wants and needs met.
Questions About Love: Choose to be in the presence of people with whom, when you do share your wants and needs, they don’t shame you. Instead, they treat you with honor and value, and they listen.
Unhealthy Relationships
Okay, this is a long one, but I think it’s a very poignant and important one. “Hey, Ken. I’m very thankful for your work and I went to trauma therapy, thanks to you. I became a much healthier person and realized my own strength. I approached a man online because I admired his morals from his post, and I thought he was a really generous person because he was taking care of his toxic and suicidal ex-girlfriend for six years. I wanted to love him the way he deserved to be love, and we had what I thought was a wonderful online relationship and attraction of inspiration. We grew together for two months and made each other better people. We were completely ourselves and could communicate about anything. We lived in different countries. We couldn’t meet because of COVID, but we both said we were willing to wait. Then he went to his ex’s house to pick up a few things, and it was obvious from his behavior afterwards that he cheated on me with her, but he didn’t tell me. He started to behave in a really odd way from his guilt, pulling away from me, and without telling me why. Seeing what he did wrong and crying, wanting to believe in my love at times, wanting to get away from it until he broke up with me. He mentioned his reasons, the distance and difference in cultures, which before the infidelity, it didn’t seem like either of us had a problem with. Be with someone who is going to do their very best to tell the truth, be kind, caring, and respectful even when it's hard.CLICK TO TWEETOur attraction of inspiration made us both into better people, but it turned into an attraction of deprivation from his infidelity. I’m not sure if we lived together if he would have been faithful or truthful after all. I think his character was tested and we both realized that he was not as good a person as he thought he was. Is there any way I could have known he would betray me like this for those two months? Because in that time, he made me feel safe and he was the best relationship that I’ve had so far. I really didn’t see the end coming. I’m wondering if the fact that he was taking care of a toxic person for so long was in fact a red flag instead of a sign of generosity. This was a shock and I don’t want it to happen to me again. Thank you.” This is very poignant and moving. Congratulations on the work that you’ve done and the growth that you’ve had. What happens when we do that work is we begin to up-level the people we met, and this guy had some real problems. We’ll talk about that in a minute, but you experienced a deep up-leveling. So often, it works that way that as we learn these lessons, we go through kind of stepping stone relationships that are signs of our growth. They’re markers of our healing and our journey. They’re better and they feel closer to being attractions of inspirations, but they’re not enough. This was certainly one of those cases. It sounds heartbreaking. I am acknowledging you for the progress, and you’re right, you do want to be more aware of red flags. I think that, and as you’re beginning to see, I just want to point some of these out. He was taking some care of someone who was toxic, which I assume means abusive, in some ways, as well as suicidal for six years. This is not someone who he went through this for a brief little time. He was deeply, deeply engaged. I would say in a situation like that, there is a red flag and there is a risk. If somebody is with someone like that for six years, there is a discussion to be had about that. I don’t know if you would have been able to know this, but there was definitely a romantic obsession, a relationship with her that had a compulsive quality to it. It was not good in those ways. I also have to say that he wasn’t that honest about it. Yeah, there were some character issues there, and I would encourage you to go back and think, “Was this a guy who, like, when he could have told the truth without too much difficulty, he fudged it a little bit? He wasn’t as honest as he could be. Might he have been in touch with this person?” Just in retrospect, do you see that there were ways that you actually didn’t feel full trust because of some of his actions, but couldn’t really put your finger on what it was? I would say those things are really important to look at.
On Again Off Again Relationships
Here’s the last question. “Hi, Ken. My name is Tiffany and I just want to say thank you so much for creating such great content on your podcast and your amazing book.” Thank you, Tiffany. “I want to learn more about your opinion regarding on again and off again relationships. I’ve been with my ex on and off, and this is our second time being on and off. It seems like the biggest issue is our vision of the future. I eventually want to get married and I obviously don’t know who it’s going to be with yet, but I want to date someone who has the same vision as me. For him, he doesn’t know if he wants to get married, and he does not think we should base our relationship on a means to an end. I see marriage as a way for me to receive security and stability. In some ways, I had a pretty unstable childhood, so it was my way of getting stability in childhood and recreating the family I didn’t have. For him, he’s not at that stage of life where he’s thinking about marriage. He started a company and he thinks I’ve been pushing a lot for intimacy that mimics a marriage, and it causes a lot of unhappiness on my end or I’m pushing for more intimacy, and he’s pushing for more space for work. I wanted to learn more about your opinion on this. Is there a way to repair this or a way to move forward? We both mentioned we don’t want to end the relationship again, but we really don’t see a path.” Tiffany, I want to make some assumptions here that may be accurate or inaccurate, but here they are. Something that I noticed in the way that you presented this was that you kind of pathologized your need for commitment. You explained it as coming from a dysfunctional family, and then you explained his, very clearly, what he didn’t like about you pushing for intimacy that mimics a marriage. To me, there was a lot of explaining why this really could be an issue on your part, and not really even looking if that might be the case for him because he just wants to work more. He’s starting a company. Underneath your desire lies really important pieces of your Core Gifts.CLICK TO TWEETI noticed an imbalance there. There was kind of more self-critique, it felt like, and I just want to say this, your desire for marriage and stability may be linked in different ways to an unstable childhood and the desire to create a family in a sense of stability that you didn’t have. Fine. It’s still your desire, and it’s a fair desire, and it’s a good desire. There are men out there who want the same thing. It is okay to want to feel the safety of stability, monogamy and marriage. It is not for everybody, but you have every right to not have to pathologize it. I just noticed, and I wondered if he’s giving you a little bit of a message that you were desire for that kind of thing maybe isn’t quite as healthy or free or liberated as his, and that maybe you should shift a little bit to just be looser and freer and all of those kinds of things. I would say that I don’t really like that. I don’t think that’s so great in all honesty, if that is happening. Maybe he’s not doing that and you’re just doing it to yourself. Even if that’s the case, I want to really encourage you to know that you have a right to want marriage and stability and a family. Those are good and great things. He has a right not to want that yet, but that doesn’t mean that it has to be this pathology of yours. In a situation like this where two people have something that they really, really care about, and it has deep, deep roots, and they feel differently, it’s a complex thing, but the most important ingredient is that both of you make space for the way the other one is feeling. In Harville Hendrix‘ Imago therapy, which is a brilliant, brilliant school of couples therapy, what they would say is that underneath your desire for connection and stability in marriage, and underneath his desire for freedom and space, lies really important pieces, your Core Gifts and his Core Gifts. If you both can speak and really listen and make space for the other one’s needs, and do this amazing act of really hearing and knowing how true this is for the other person, it might help you to move on. If you feel really stuck, get help. Get couple’s therapy. If he feels like that’s too much like marriage and you’re not getting through this, that’s like a marker of a real problem if he’s not willing to do that. I would recommend that because, in therapy, you both can do the deeper listening. I have known couples that have had differences that seemed irreconcilable, but because they loved each other and cared about each other so much, they found a way to reconcile them. I have known that to happen. I’ve been very inspired by those stories, but it takes a deep, deep level of honesty, truth and experimentation. If the two of you can do that without pathologizing each other, then that is wonderful. What I would say is most of us need help with that, and I want to offer a fabulous resource. Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt are two brilliant, brilliant thought leaders in this field. They have taken the concept of Imago therapy and all of their decades of work in the field, and distilled it down to a process that anybody can learn to listen and communicate in deeper ways. This distills the essence of so much of the Imago therapy work that I love so much. You can go to SafeConversations.com and you can learn more about how you can learn this technique of deeper listening, which is life-changing. It’s hard work but man, it’s amazing. Especially in an arena like this, I believe something like that is incredibly helpful. If you can’t do it yourselves, get some help. Go to therapy and get some support. I think that’s really important, but don’t pathologize your desire to want to get married and have stability. Those are good and beautiful things. Thank you, all. I know this was a much longer than usual episode and I still have a lot more questions that I need to catch up with, and I will in a few more episodes. Thank you all for listening and I look forward to connecting with you again on the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast.Watch the episode here:
Important Links:
- Deeper Dating
- DeeperDating.com
- DeeperDatingPodcast.com
- iTunes – Deeper Dating Podcast
- Thích Nhất Hạnh
- Dawson Church
- Nick Ortner
- Jessica Ortner
- Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt
- SafeConversations.com
Table of Contents
- Being In A Relationship With An Active Addict
- Sex Addiction: Do You Have One?
- Being In A Relationship With A Porn Addict
- Codependence Versus Prodependence
- The Next Steps
Addiction And Love: An Interview With Rob Weiss, Ph.D.
A Compassionate New Understanding




Addiction And Love: Some people call themselves addicts simply because their sexual behavior goes against their values and beliefs.



Table of Contents
- My Story
- First Stage: Embroiled In Relationships
- Second Stage: We Begin To Claim The Beauty Of Our Hearts
- Third Stage: Attractions And Relationships Of Inspiration
How Deep Friendship Paves The Way To Deepest Love
Single People: Building Your Family Of Creation




Table of Contents
- Look For Events And Communities Of People With The Same Values
- Finding A Learning Partner
- Admit You Are Pushing Love Away
3 Powerful Ways To Speed Your Path To Love—Right Now!
Life-Changing Hacks That Lead To Romantic Love And Personal Healing


Look For Events And Communities Of People With The Same Values
These different tools that I’m going to give you will help you live the magic of who you are, of what your gifts are. It will help you mature and develop those gifts and learn to become more of an artisan in your search for love and your intimacy journey as a whole. They’re all a little bit uphill. They take some work, they take some practice, but the first one is one that I have resisted a lot in my life, and then breaking through that resistance is what led to my marriage and a lot of growth. It was the absolute essence of what transformed a pretty painful and rough period of decades of deeply looking for love and never finding it. This was something that really transformed it, and here’s what it was. I stopped looking for love in my old ways, which in those days as a gay man in New York City, involved the clubs, the parties, and all of those kinds of things. It’s not that I didn’t adore dancing and continue dancing even when I changed these patterns because I did, but changing these patterns changed my world and changed my life. The skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love.CLICK TO TWEETIt was saying that I’m not just going to look for people in those ways, which now is just somewhat kind of mindless, habitual, or non-soulful approach to finding love online, which I think is the common way that people do that now. Instead, saying that you are going to think about what your deepest passions, interests, and values are, and that you are going to go to, at this point, online environments When you can go to non-online environments, fantastic, but there’s so much online too, with people who deeply share the values and passions that matter the most to you.

Finding A Learning Partner
Next, find a learning partner. Literally, these three tools will change your future. They truly will so much more than a lot of the habitual patterns that probably, if you’re anything like I was, and like so many of us are, you’ve tried again and again but haven’t necessarily worked. Find a learning partner. How do you find a learning partner? You go through your list of connections. You look for someone preferably single, but they don’t have to be single, because you can support them in whatever area they want to grow in. It’s nice if it’s two single people doing that. There’s something really good about that. Someone who has integrity. Someone who doesn’t hurt you, who cares about you, who has your best interest at heart. Someone who has good character and someone who is willing to grow, change, and work toward their goal. Someone with a rich sense of insight. Those people are A-team. They are our gold. There is almost no greater meat and potatoes intimacy skill than seeing the ways we're not available for love and then changing it.CLICK TO TWEETIf you find somebody like that, and you commit to just connecting together for half an hour a week, making plans and bringing mindfulness and awareness to your search for love, you can use a template of learning. Any teacher that you want, including my work, the Deeper Dating work, but any template you want. The two of you could use that together and you could go through it. Every week you could touch base to bring more power, bravery, depth, habit-breaking, risk-taking, vulnerability, and commitment to love, to your journey. I pretty much promise you, you will shave off vast amounts of time in your search for healthy love if you do this. The research backs this up 1,000%. We need a community or a person with whom we can learn, have insights, practice those insights, and do all of the failing, rewiring, bitching, complaining, sharing, longing, yearning, complaining some more. All the things that we do with people that we feel safe with when we’re on a journey with them, that you will get to do that with them. There will be so many points where you bring something up, and they’re just going to say something, and it’s going to touch you. It’s going to open a door and it’s going to spark a kind of ambition to growth and healing. That is beautiful. We learn from jumping from stone to stone, from rock to rock. Sometimes I think of the wiser dating journey as being like the Parkour. There you are, and there’s a ledge in front of you. There’s a space you can’t get through, so you look at what’s the next ledge that you could somehow get to, which for you, for me, for us is the next point of insight, the next point of understanding, the next point of commitment. Those insights are our fuel. We leap from where we are into that insight and it brings us to the next ledge, to the next rock, to the next point. We wait for insight and we get insight from our learning partner. We get insight from our practices, from our growth, and when we get that, we just make a leap. How does this Parkour person get from one point to another that looks just completely crazy? They do it by looking at the next point that they can leap to.
Admit You Are Pushing Love Away
The third is a little bit harder. It takes a lot of courage. It is incredibly powerful. You get a huge bang for your buck with this one. You truly do. You change your field. You change your future. That is to admit. It’s a humbling thing to admit the ways that you are pushing love away even as you’re seeking it. Maybe you keep choosing people that you know in your guts aren’t going to be right for you or aren’t going to be good for you. Maybe you keep choosing people that you’re not deeply passionate about because they’re safer. Maybe you find that you’re drinking too much or smoking too much. Maybe it’s internet porn. Maybe you meet wonderful people, and then you kind of feel the need to flee. These are humbling things to face, but let me tell you, if you can, with the help of your learning partner or on your own, but hopefully with the help of your learning partner or therapist or coach, if you can find the ways that you are pushing love away consciously, unconsciously, semi-consciously, and you can admit those things to yourself, it’s very humbling, but it is very life changing. If you can make a plan to change that, and then please get the support you need because we do not change patterns just by willpower almost ever. That’s usually a myth. We do it and the research backs this up. I think 10% of people who want to change a really deeply entrenched pattern succeed unless they have a template for a process that they believe in, and they have a community of support where they can fail, pick themselves up, rewire and get support and care again and again. That’s who succeeds. If you can admit this humbling truth that almost against your own will, you are avoiding love, turning from it, pushing it away, not making yourself present for it. If you can do that, I believe that’s heroic, truly heroic. What I can almost completely promise you, but it’s something that I have found to be true again and again, when you address that, when you change that, there will be ways that your world will open. The people you meet will be different. The way you interact with them will be different, and your luck will shift. There’s almost nothing that you’re going to get a bigger bang for your buck around in your search for love than admitting the places where your fear of intimacy holds you back, and full-heartedly with support, addressing those things. It changes your luck. It changes your field. This may take some searching to find a path that you really believe in, teachings that you believe in, support that feels safe and that you really believe in. This is something I’ve found to be really true in my own life. There is almost no greater meat and potatoes intimacy skill than seeing the ways that we’re not available for love, and admitting it and longing to change, and then practicing changing. That is one of the most central intimacy skills that exist, not to be beyond our fear of intimacy, but to begin to learn its language, to work with it, and to create transformation. Thank you for listening. Before we end this episode, I want to encourage you to just take a minute. I encourage you not to get through and pass this episode without doing this. Consider picking one of these. Allow yourself to become a kind of growth athlete in your search for love. It’s a joyful, empowering, wonderful experience. It’s like that great experience when you exercise, and all of a sudden, you notice that you have more strength, more resilience, more muscle, more bounce. It’s just the best feeling. The same is true in our search for love when we start to really bring wisdom to it. There’s a joy that happens when we know that we’re really making change around something that matters so much. I deeply encourage each one of you to try at least one of these things. Just take it on. Take on all three if you really are ready to go for it and watch what happens. Thank you so much for listening. Go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com or DeeperDating.com. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode.Table of Contents
- Attraction Patterns
- Understanding And Recognizing Marijuana Use In A Partner
- The Wave
- Your Core Gifts
Deeper Dating Q&A: Expert Advice For All Your Questions About Love, Dating And Sex

Attraction Patterns
The first question is from Laura, and she has two questions. Number one is the idea of attractions of inspiration and attractions of deprivation. Is that a spectrum or is that very black and white? For those new listeners, I’m just going to say a little bit really quickly about what attractions of inspiration and deprivation are. Episode 10 explains these two different kinds of attractions in much greater detail, but an attraction of deprivation is when we get attracted to somebody because their love and their availability seems so close, but it’s not there. We think we need to change ourselves and fix ourselves, or change and fix them to finally get it right, and we get lost in those relationships often for a really long time, and they’re very seductive. An attraction of inspiration is when you’re attracted to someone because of their integrity, their goodness, their growing availability, and their decency. It’s a very different circuitry of attraction. One leads to pain and one leads to the real potential for happiness, so absolutely it’s a spectrum. There is nobody who is a perfect attraction of inspiration. There’s nobody, well, I don’t know about nobody, but probably really close to nobody, who is a pure attraction of deprivation. There can be extremes in either of those cases, but you want to look for one where in your heart you can say, “This is deeply, truly, and essentially an attraction of inspiration.” The other part of the question is, can one partner in a partnership be attracted out of inspiration and the other person be attracted out of deprivation? That’s a really interesting question and definitely, that is a possibility. One partner can be deeply inspired by the other partner, and that other partner could feel like, “This person is really just not able to meet my needs,” so yes, absolutely.
Understanding And Recognizing Marijuana Use In A Partner
Next question, “Hi, Ken, I love your show and your book, and I’m a big fan. I am starting in a new relationship after having been single for most of the past five years. We’re almost two months in, and this guy is really great. He’s everything on my man list and more. He’s fun. He’s sweet. He’s got a successful career. He successfully raised a son. He has multiple degrees. He’s very thoughtful and romantic. He’s a wonderful lover and he’s supportive of me. He follows through in his words. He’s responsible with money, and he has plans for the future that even include me now. He’s asked me if I want to be included. All of that sounds so fabulous. The only issue I have is that he smokes marijuana on a regular basis after work or when he’s done with his responsibilities. I don’t have a problem with recreational marijuana use, but it concerns me when it’s almost every day. He doesn’t drink too much. I’m afraid to tell my friends about this because I don’t want them to tell me that I shouldn’t be with him because he is so great. I would love your feedback.” My first thought is this guy sounds great and there’s such good here, and I just want to really acknowledge that. What I would say simply is conversation is needed. One of the signs of an addiction is that you use a substance to get away from or to control or to medicate certain symptoms. That’s a real question. If he needs to smoke every day, what is he doing it for? Is it to calm down? Is it to get more relaxed? Is it to listen to music? What are his reasons for doing it? Because there are issues that he is medicating by doing that, and that’s an important thing. That’s an important thing to be aware of. Our Core Gifts are the qualities in us that are the most tender, sensitive, and passionate. They are the deepest inner petals of our being.CLICK TO TWEETThe other thing is that research shows really simply, what goes up has to come down. The main psychoactive ingredient in cannabis is THC, which activates cannabinoid receptors that are found in the brain. Those receptors are really important and they allow us to experience novel sensations. They relax us. They give us a zing in terms of our experiencing of life. All these things happen, but the reverse happens as well. The receptors in our brain, which can allow us to experience these novel sensations, this relaxation, this richer experience of life actually diminish when we smoke weed too regularly. People who use marijuana regularly have 20% fewer of those receptors in their brain’s cortex, and it takes a month of total abstinence to be able to upregulate to the normal levels. In other words, after the high, there is a low, and here are some of the symptoms of that low. After your high, there’s a restlessness and a fidgety feeling, and often it’s worse when you’re trying to go to sleep. There’s anxiety, irritability, loss of appetite, boredom, which is the opposite of novelty, which marijuana helps you enjoy in an even more intense way, and insomnia. All of those things can come with different parts of life, and it takes a rigorous degree of honesty to say, “Do I feel like I smoke or I get high because I want more of the opposite of those negative things?” Because when you’re used to smoking weed every day, you experience these negative symptoms and then you use the weed to try to get over them. There’s a cycle that happens there and it takes, as I said, a month of abstinence to actually notice if there are shifts and changes. You are changing your brain, and so many people talk about a kind of quality of irritability or boredom. There is certainly research proven – less ability to enjoy and delight in novel experiences in life, with the diminishment of those receptors.
The Wave
Next, “Hello, Ken, I have a question about the wave,” and the wave is what I think of as the single biggest saboteur of healthy new love. I talk about it in a lot of detail in Episode 39, but I know it destroyed my capacity to find love for decades. It’s when someone is really available, decent, and present, and all of a sudden, you just want to flee. You feel claustrophobic. Your interest plummets. You feel judgmental of that person. In my experience, more than half the people at events that where I’m teaching experience the wave. The journey to accept, name, and treasure our Core Gifts is the journey that changes everything in our dating life.CLICK TO TWEET“My recently ex-boyfriend and I are in our late 50s so we’ve been dating for three years. The first year we spent in the same state, the last two we’ve been traveling back and forth between nearby states, and I was set to move to his state. I had a wonderful job opportunity, and we had discussed closing the distance gap for a while. This seemed like the chance to do it, but the bottom fell out of my heart when he balked. There was no sincerity in his voice. I asked if he still saw a future for us, because he’d been acting kind of distant for the past few months, which I attributed to the wave. A week after my job interview, I was back in my state and he sent me a breakup email. He wanted to remain friends but in the last few months, he’s actually become surly and angry even at his dog. His sister says he’s been dating randomly, even during COVID. This is not the man I’ve known for three years. I’m concerned for him, but I just want to know if this is wave behavior or perhaps this is his true personality.” Here’s what I’d like to say about that. This does not seem like just the wave. The wave is a wave. It is not sustained. There’s a quality of anger and disconnection that is indicative of a real problem here. I don’t know if it’s an addiction problem of some sort that would often manifest in this kind of a way, or if you’re seeing qualities in his personality that apart from addiction are really part of his characteralogical structure. I would say this doesn’t seem like the wave. It’s too sustained. It’s too angry. It’s too unpleasant. This is for some reason him. I think the chances are significant that there’s some kind of trauma or some kind of addiction, because it’s different than he’s ever been before. It makes me want to ask listeners, have you ever had an experience like that where someone seemed like one person, and then they shifted so significantly, and that shift remained sustained or kept coming back again and again?
Your Core Gifts
Here’s a question from Lisa in the Netherlands. “Dear, Mr. Page. I bought your book I think a year ago, and I want to say thank you because I think it’s the first time in my life that I really have hoped to find someone who can actually love me for who I am. I have a question because it’s hard for me to find out what my Core Gifts are, and the problem is that I see again and again, when I go to that place of myself and my gifts, I get stuck. I grew up in a family where I was rejected for almost everything. I was too sensitive. I was too smart. I was too honest. I was too fierce. I was too shy. I was too strong. Nothing was okay, so I’ve done a lot of things to really start embracing and accepting myself, but when you say, ‘What’s your Core Gift?’ I just don’t know, so how can you find out what your Core Gift is when there’s so much rejection in your life in so many aspects?” This is a wonderful question. What I would say to you first, Lisa, is that you just named your Core Gifts in what you said. Now this concept, folks, of Core Gift is a really rich, deep, and important one. It’s something I speak about a lot in my book and in an ongoing way in this podcast. Our Core Gifts are the qualities in us, which are the most tender, sensitive, passionate. They are the deepest inner petals of our being, and often we have shame around them. We’re embarrassed around them. Their uniqueness scares us or embarrasses us. We’ve been shamed or hurt around them. The degree to which we don’t accept these attributes of ourselves is the degree to which we’re going to be sexually and romantically attracted to people who aren’t good for us. The journey to accept and name and treasure these Core Gifts is the journey that changes everything in our dating life, and when we learn to not just accept these qualities but cherish them, our attractions change, our love life changes, and our life changes in powerful ways, which is why this Deeper Dating journey is one of the richest journeys that a human being can experience in their life. What I would say to you, Lisa, is that the depth and richness of your being, frightened or, intimidated your family. I would say that you listed all your Core Gifts. You are deeply sensitive. You are smart. You’re really honest. You’re fierce. You’re also shy. You’re powerful but you’re also tender. You named all the qualities, and here’s something I want to say about this. In my work with people, in my intensives, in my courses, in everything around Core Gifts, once this concept becomes clear, what are the places where you are touched most deeply by life in pain or in joy and meaning? Those speak to your Core Gifts. There is in the book, and actually if you go to DeeperDating.com and you subscribe to my mailing list, you’ll get the first two chapters of the book in which I teach you all of the ways to discover and identify your Core Gifts. When you discover them, when people acknowledge and see, using these methods, their Core Gift, you just did that, Lisa, by saying, “What were the things I have been rejected for in my life?” The hardest part is to actually say, “Yup, those are Core Gifts. I am going to accept that these are treasures, that there is genius here, that there is power here, that these really are mine.” That’s harder than actually even finding and naming these qualities, and Lisa, that’s what I would say. You named them and you listed them, and each one is to be treasured. That’s the task, is the growing ability to treasure, honor, and listen to those parts of you. Trauma surgically bonds terrible feelings to precious parts of our being. We need to separate that bond by learning to love those parts of ourselves. The first step is naming them. The next step is learning to treasure them, and understand the gifts that they give us. Along with that is this incredibly important step of finding our tribe, the people who love these qualities about us. All of those pieces are necessary and yes, it’s a hard journey, especially if there’s been trauma, but that’s the journey you are on, Lisa. Thank you for that question. I will be answering more questions in the next Q&A episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast. I thank everybody for joining me. I will see you in the next episode, and if you go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com, join my mailing list, you’ll get lots more information about resources around this entire deeper journey to love. Thank you so much.Table of Contents


The Slow Part Of The Journey
I think that when I teach people about CORE GIFTS, it’s so powerful and so liberating for people to understand that, especially when we do the deep intensive work. It’s such a liberating, wonderful thing that there’s just a great sense of hope, and then people see that they are beginning to meet different kinds of people, that maybe their field or their understanding of themselves is actually beginning to shift. That is also fabulous, wonderful, empowering and exciting. Then there’s kind of like what happens between then and when you find your partner. That can be slow-going and hard. There can be repetitions of so many sadnesses and so many lonelinesses. That’s a hard part of the journey in very unique ways. Every part of the journey is humbling. It’s both humbling and thrilling, good, and wonderful when we heal and when we grow. We discover new mastery, but it’s all humbling too. This stage where we’re looking, and it hasn’t happened yet, and it could feel like that’s going on for way too long, can be a really difficult stage. I remember a dream I had once when I was fiercely, deeply into my intimacy journey, my desire to change the way that I date. I hope that for all of you, you are reaching a point where you can say, “I am deeply into my intimacy journey. I am learning, I am working on this, I’m really trying, I’m learning things, I’m changing.” If you can say that, there’s just such hope in that, but I remember very much being in that place of learning and growing, and very much still being single. I remember a dream I had. There was a couple that fell deeply, deeply in love. I was watching this in my dream, and they were kissing each other, and they were so deeply in love. I somehow ended up having this beautiful, dewy rose in my hand. This beautiful rose with dew on it, it was my rose. Every step of the intimacy journey shows us our clay feet.CLICK TO TWEETThey were so in love and I handed them the rose, and they really appreciated it, then they were out of the dream. I was filled with bittersweetness and I just wept. I was glad that I gave them that rose, but I was just viscerally experiencing my loneliness. For me, that period where I finally let myself stop rushing and could feel my loneliness, I knew that was a sign of progress. That dream I knew was a harbinger of something new. I could feel, even though it hurt, that I was on my way. What I would want for all of you that are on this journey is that you feel like, “It’s not going as perfectly as I wanted. I’m not there yet, but I’m on my way. I’m growing and I feel progress. I’m learning lessons of authenticity, truth, kindness and revealing, and making better choices,” because that’s such a huge one, is the choices we make. I say this a lot. We focus all the time on how attractive we are, and so not enough on our patterns of attraction. I’ve never done an episode like this before, where I just riff on the things that I think are important. I’m always a lot more prepared. You may have a different experience with this. I hope it’s a useful experience because the subject of what it’s like in the middle is such a big deal. Here’s maybe the greatest thing that I want to tell you, is don’t do it alone. Don’t do it alone. I used to love watching Sex and the City. I mean, these women were hitting up against their own brick walls again and again and again, but they at least got to have fun with each other and laugh and talk. I know for me, I needed friends who could guide me. I’ve mentioned this before. I created a support group for chronically single psychotherapists. It was only a few of us, but these were very wonderful people. Each week, we would come in with our struggles, what was happening in our dating life, where we were getting stuck, you know that experience of again and again, “Damn, I am hitting up against the same walls. I feel inept and I feel stuck, and I feel inadequate. What do I do?” Each of us would speak and the other members would hold what we said with care, and with what I call “cupped hands”. In that being held, my friends would notice openings that I didn’t see, like when you have a giant knot and you don’t know what to do with it, but there’s one thread that you could pull at and create an opening. They would notice these openings and they would share them with me. I still remember how pivotal that was, and how that changed my journey and other people’s journeys too. Many people in that group are now married and in couples. It’s just too hard a journey to do alone, and it’s not a smart journey to do alone because we will, even with help, again and again and again, play out old patterns. There’s pretty much no class that I teach where I don’t encourage people to have a learning partner, in my audio course, in my book, in my intensive. In fact, even on DeeperDating.com, when people fill out their profiles, I ask if they are interested in finding a learning partner, and there’s actually a special functionality where you can click to look for learning partners from anywhere who can pair with you, to take this journey with you and learn together, and grow together. I just can’t say how much I believe in the importance of that. Also, it could be a lonely journey, and this helps. It helps a lot. It’s kind of crazy actually to think that we can do this by ourselves, and so much of the education and the advice out there tells us, “Just change this, just change this, just change this,” but change is not easy. This is such a truth that we forget again and again.
Beautiful Forks In The Road
Every day, I wake up thinking I am going to get so much done. Every day at the end of the day, I think, “Oh my God, I got so much less done than my most conservative picture of what I could get done could even show.” I got done less than that. I’m 64 years old. I do this every single day. Change is not an easy thing. Rewiring is just not an easy thing. That’s something else I just want to talk about. I want to talk about the beauty of bewildering crossroads. How many times have you been in a situation in your dating life or your life-life where you’re like, “Damn, I am here again at this stuck place where I’ve done the same thing again,” or where, “I feel not seen, not heard, disappointed or betrayed, again. It’s happening again and I’m helpless because I don’t know how to stop this?” A bewildering point where you just don’t know how to behave or how to handle something, or you’re frustrated, resentful or angry. These are the intimacy crossroads that we experience, and they’re holy and powerful. Left to our own devices, whatever it is that our kind of inner kid told us is the best way to do this, push through, ignore other people’s needs. Only focus on other people’s needs and ignore our needs. The tendency, the fierce, fierce wired tendency is to do the same things. When we’re connected with someone or when we’re connected with our own inner wisdom, and I’m going to lead you in a beautiful process for your crossroads in just a couple of minutes, but whenever we’re in that situation, it’s a place to deconstruct as opposed to push through in our old ways. I think that’s an act of intimacy greatness when at those crossroads where we’re triggered, stuck, bewildered, pissed off, hurt, irritated, whatever things we are, confused, lonely. We have an old pattern of how we’re going to get through that that just somehow has not really worked that great. We can stop and somehow deconstruct, like soften around that hardened pattern, get brave around the ways that we avoid, whatever it is that we can come to that crossroads and rest, think, connect, and find some wisdom. Find some wisdom and do it differently. That’s magic. That builds the foundation for the life that we dream of, the life that we want. Such a rich thing these crossroads, and God knows, kazillions of crossroads, I do the same way, but those crossroads where I can stop and decenter, often by getting advice from wise, loving friends, or by doing this Inner Mentor Process, which is my favorite process in the world, and which many of you have done already. This is a crossroads process because again and again, when I’m at a stuck place, I do this Inner Mentor Process and I deconstruct my stuck place, and a breeze of wisdom comes in. I start to see the good there. I see the possibility. I see the potential. I soothe myself. I have a sense of grace, and then some wisdom pours in that’s just like essence of the best of me, and my ancestors, and the people that love me and support me, and my teachers. I can feel it. I can feel the goodness, the sweetness, the airiness, and the spaciousness of the insight that I am given when I’m at this crossroads, and I do the Inner Mentor Process, which I do pretty much every day, and I’d like to do a number of times every day. That’s a goal of mine. I would love to lead you in this process because this is a way to find a friend, and it’s the friend of the you that you were born to be. It’s a friend of the you that is soft, caring, wise, strong and grounded. It’s the you that people who love you get to see and feel at your best. It’s your magic place. Change is not an easy thing. We have a fierce, wired tendency to do the same things again and again.CLICK TO TWEETBecoming Your Inner Mentor
Let’s do this. I’d like you to just close your eyes and just take a moment, and just relax. If you’ve had me do this Inner Mentor Process with you before, awesome, let’s do it again. You’re going to get a different set of guidance. Maybe you’ll get the same set of guidance but it will land in a different way. Get comfortable. I’d like you to remember a time that you felt really comfortable in your own skin; healthy, solid, good, and positive. Just remember a moment, a time when you felt that way. Don’t look for perfection in the way that you visualize this because my visualizations are like Swiss cheese, like moments of getting it, big moments if not, big holes. That’s fine. I love visualization because I accept that mine are like Swiss cheese. Give yourself that grace and that freedom. Also, you don’t have to have the perfect memory, just a general memory and even just little moments of glimpse. Do that and remember that very unique, good feeling of feeling right in your own skin. Now I want you to remember a time that you felt a deep and beautiful love. I would just ask that it not be like a memory that is traumatic, that traumatizes you, in other words, like someone who betrayed you. Even if the person is not alive and you might have sadness, but it still is not traumatic and it holds goodness, that’s a fine memory. A time that you felt filled with a big and great and deep love. It could have been a spiritual moment, it could have been in nature, it doesn’t matter. Just remember what that was like. Gently and graciously hold that memory. I think of it like a breeze with a beautiful scent. You don’t smell it all the time, but there are moments that you do, and then you just enjoy that. That’s how I’d like you to remember this moment, if that fits for you. Just hold that to your heart what that’s like. Now I’d like you to remember a time that you were at a crossroads, and you deconstructed an old way of behaving, and handled it in a better way and felt really good as a result. A time you did something different. You pivoted from an old, not helpful way. You did something wiser and it worked that it was good. Remember what that felt like, just hold that memory. Now I just want you to imagine the you that lives that way, like a you that is the enlightened you, that lives in the flow of those feelings. It’s an imagination. You don’t have to be there yet. You just imagine this you. On some level, it’s so close to you. It’s like a sibling. It’s so close because you know that you. It’s you. It’s the you you’re meant to be. It’s the you unblocked. It’s the you beautiful. Picture that you, imagine that you, full throttle, open, relaxed, present, essence of you. Now I want you to imagine that you become that you, just for the moment. It’s an imagination exercise, but it’s awesome, because it’s a practice to actually move toward becoming that you. Just imagine that you are that you, and that you actually step into that role. You step into the body, the heart and the face, behind the eyes of that you. In your guts, in your kishkes, in your heart, you’re you, in your fingertips. You are this you, and just feel and imagine what that’s like.
Table of Contents


Write A Valentine’s Day Card
Now, I want to share one for couples. This is actually one that is not just for couples, but it’s a great one for couples. Here’s what it is. You’re going to be probably writing a Valentine’s Day card. If you’re not, I really encourage you to. I encourage you in this card to really take the time to describe the things you most love, most respect, and most learn from about your partner. It’s easy to say that you love them and why you love them. That’s great. We want that in the card, but to then say what you respect them deeply for about who they are, and then getting really vulnerable. What you learned from them, what they teach you, because you’re with them, because they have gifts that you’re trying to cultivate that they’re better at, and of course, vice versa. You can make a pact that the two of you write this letter to each other. That’s even more fabulous, but in it, you put in all the words of what you love, respect, adore, and are attracted to about them. It feels very vulnerable to do it, but when you do it from that place, you will feel your Eros begin to loosen up like that same squeaky tin can thing. You will find your heart and your love begins to loosen, and your Eros begin to loosen up again. It’s also a really important process because we live in a kind of great poverty of understanding what our deepest gifts are, and that makes us spin around in circles. It’s very hard to go forward into a difficult world if we can’t name the treasures of our being, our Core Gifts which often have been stepped on or taken advantage of, but which are the treasures of our being in which our life’s task is to learn to become heroes around those qualities.
Connect
Next, single folks. There are so many different things. This is just a quick one, but I want to encourage you to look at the new wave of dating sites and functionalities using video, using ways to connect. I will say that my husband and I have put heart and soul into this new event, which is called Deeper Dating. It’s actually experience events online as well as an online platform. It’s built with love and for love. It’s built to incubate intimacy every step of the way throughout the process. We’d love to have you joined and you can join for free, and connect with people for free too, and hear about upcoming events in your area. This gives me great joy to be able to tell you about.Discover Your Inner Dating Coach
The next kind of process or hack that I would love to share with you is one of my very favorite processes in the world. I do it pretty much every day. I have a buddy that we share our Inner Mentor Processes with. I’m going to tell you what it is. You’re going to discover your inner dating coach. Just follow me along with this. I just want you to imagine yourself, and I’m going to keep it pretty brief. You can find recordings of this. There’s an entire episode, it’s episode number three, focused on this exercise, but here’s a quick one. I like you to remember a time that you felt like your love was flowing freely and beautifully. There was that wonderful sense of love, not with someone who betrayed you. It doesn’t have to be with someone you’re with now, but when you do it, I don’t want you to do it about a relationship where there’s the flavor of betrayal in it. When we get to these really reactive and difficult junctures, and somebody tells us something wise, we soften and loosen.CLICK TO TWEETSomeone with whom you could think of this, and remember the good in a very rich way. A time that you felt like really the love flowing between you and another person. It does not have to be a romantic partner. It could be a child, it could be a grandparent, it could be anything, it could be a pet, but the way that it feels for you when love is flowing, when that oil can has really lubricated your being and love is moving through you. You don’t have to remember perfectly, but just remember the wonderfulness of that. I want you to remember a time that you felt really comfortable in your own skin, and how marvelous that feels to feel comfortable in your own skin. It could be at any point in your life, and you don’t have to bring it back perfectly. It could be a gentle wisp of a memory that comes in and out. It doesn’t have to be really strong or crisp by the time that you felt that and how that felt. We’re going to do one more. A time that you got through a relationship difficulty in a really good way with someone who could listen to you, where the two of you moved to a new positive place together, and you remember that there was learning in it and growth for you. It didn’t have to be a big change, but it was something where you said, “I’ve just learned something about how to love and how that felt,” how that feels in your heart. Now, I just want you to imagine, and it’s a fantasy, a you who loves freely as you, a you who stands in his or her or their own feet, loving as you are from the heart, and the soul, and the core of who you are. This is just you, like the you that you’re meant to be when you’re fully unfurled in love. Just picture that. You don’t have to earn it or be it right now, but just imagine it. Imagine what this being’s face looks like, how it feels in this being’s heart. Now, I’d like you to imagine that you jump into this self, this inner mentor, this you that you’re meant to be. Just jump in, it’s a fantasy. It’s just a fantasy, but it’s also not a fantasy because you know what it feels like on some level to be this being, because you’re in some ways almost there. Feel, imagine that you are there. You are actually there, you are this you, and look at the you of today. Right now, in your intimacy journey, from this place of essence of wonderful, unfurled you, what do you want to say to the you of today? If you have paper and pen, write it down, otherwise speak it out loud or whisper it, or just think it. Take a minute to do this. You can pause this for as long as you like. That is your inner mentor message. You can go back and do this so quickly. You could do it at the drop of a hat once you get comfortable, really quick. I promise you, at the crossroads of your intimacy choices when you do this, the response you get, the wisdom you get will move you in a different direction at those crossroads. Every one of those directions weaves you in a different life direction, in a different life pattern, and weaves you and moves you closer to richer, deeper love. Try this. Have this inner mentor be a dear partner to you. The other gift that happens with this is that the more you do it, the more you become that inner mentor, the more comfortable you are living in that amazing space. This is a treasure of an exercise, and I encourage you to use it, to do it, to do it every day, to do it really quickly, but watch what happens. You’re just going to love what happens.
The Marriage Hack
Next, this is for couples and it’s pretty cool. It’s called the marriage hack. This is a technique that is very highly researched. It was developed by Eli Finkel, a very renowned relationship expert and researcher. The marriage hack, and you can do this with close friends too. You can do it in all kinds of relationships, but this is an exercise that what Eli says is that it is the best 21 minutes that you will spend all year if you want to improve your life. The research shows that the quality of your spousal relationship affects the quality of your life more than anything else, including your health. It’s pretty wild. By healing the quality of our spousal relationships, we just bring so much more love and ease into our lives, and meaning, and possibility. If you look at a graph of the trajectory of marital or spousal relationship quality, you don’t have to be married, but it’s a committed relationship. If you look at a graph, you see that virtually, almost every couple, the quality of their connection decreases the quality of their communication, of their listening, of their treasuring. It gently decreases year after year. It’s a downward slope that’s almost universal, not a quick one in the cases of most healthy relationships but it’s a downward slope. This exercise, basically wherever you’re at, it won’t raise you to a higher level of your slope, other things will, but it will stop the slope from going downward, which is why the sooner you begin this process, Eli says, the better for you. Here’s what it is. It’s very much like the Inner Mentor Process. You could actually even add the Inner Mentor Process if you like. Here’s what it is, 21 minutes. The first thing that each of you do together is to think about a recent argument. It’s an argument that kind of captures a stuck point in your relationship. It’s a kind of argument or stuck place that happens again and again. You are going to write down the experience of a recent argument where this happened to you. Maybe it’s nagging, maybe it’s around sex, maybe it’s not feeling listened to, maybe it’s differences in how you relate to money, or the children, or politics. First, just write down what that is, then you’re going to write three different things. Each of them is going to take seven minutes long. You’re going to think of this conflict and you’re going to imagine a neutral third-party that wants the best for everybody, wants the best for both of you and for the two of you as a couple, and for each of you individually. A neutral third-party that wants that. You may even tweak that a little bit I think, and make it like a very wise-being. The research shows doing this exercise with thinking of a neutral third-party who wants the best for everybody. You’re going to write about what this neutral third-party would tell the two of you to do to handle this. Again, a neutral wise third-party who wants the best for both of you. Write down seven minutes what this person would say to the two of you to help you both get through this. The second question you’ll answer for another seven minutes, each of you will do this, is what do you think are the obstacles that you’re going to confront when you try to adopt this new approach or perspective? You’re going to write about the obstacles that you think will happen for you as you try to make this change. Both of you do that, seven minutes. The third seven minutes is you write down what you can do individually and as a couple to surmount those obstacles. What Eli says is that the greatest determinant of a healthy relationship is how the couple handles conflict. That’s the greatest determinant of a good relationship. This gives both of you the space to think in really different ways, and to think in more conscious, more caring, and more compassionate ways. What Eli says is that the research shows that the two of you get to do this together. You might not want to do it on Valentine’s Day because it could be a little difficult, or you might want to do it on Valentine’s Day. You do this 21 minutes once a year. The research clearly shows there’s beautiful and dramatic results. These are four different hacks that I’m very excited to share with you. Each of them will open up a world and open up your world to becoming that person who you were born to be, who you’re meant to be, who can love more fully, richly and wisely. We know there is nothing better than that. The knowledge that you’re going to tackle this will change your Valentine’s Day for the richer and the better. All my best to all of you on this Valentine’s Day, and on your entire future journey in intimacy. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode.Table of Contents
How To Discover Your Core Gifts In Your Most Challenging Qualities

Gifts Deep In Our Core
In this very early part of our new year, I want to share a counterintuitive approach to change that I find tremendously exciting. Here’s the central idea – It’s that our deepest wounds, and bewilderments, and complications spring from our deepest gifts. Gifts that we have not learned how to handle and bare their power and their sensitivity as fully as we need to. By acknowledging these gifts, taking time to name them, and learning to treasure them and honor them, we can speed and deepen our own healing, and definitely our search for love. Our deepest wounds, bewilderments, and complications spring from our deepest gifts.CLICK TO TWEETIn these podcast episodes, in my book Deeper Dating, and in my course, I talk about the concept of Core Gifts. Those are the places of deepest sensitivity, tenderness, passion, and meaning within us. They’re the places where we have the greatest capacity to love and to create. They are also the places where most of us have been profoundly hurt. They are the places that we tend to either suppress our real self or act out our real self and get in trouble. These are our trigger spots because they are a place of deepest sensitivity. They are the places where the nerve endings of our being are the richest and most full. They are incredibly important.
Unleashing The Undomesticated Genius
How does that awareness lead to healing for me, for us? How could we use this knowledge to heal our wounds and liberate the gifts trapped inside them? The first thing is to understand the gifts that lie there, that come out in convulsive, and immature, and imperfect ways, but something is coming out. Something is trying to be spoken, known and seen, and understood. We have to find what that is. You might want to take a minute right now and think about a quality in your being, in your personality that has this intensity that maybe you’ve wondered, is it too intense? Is it too sensitive? Is it too tender? Is it too demanding? I would say that the task is to find the Core Gift that lies there. Maybe it’s a quality of not enough, like, “I’m too quiet, I’m too tender, I’m too passive.” In those cases as well, there is a gift that lies there. For example, qualities of passion have this “something really matters to you”, and we want to find what that is, what that thing is that mattered to you in that situation so much again and again. Maybe it’s truth. Maybe it’s a connection. Those are some of the things that we can get really passionate about.

A Life-Changing Exercise for Everyone Who Has Lost A Loved One
Wisdom from Dr. Jamie Turndorf’s book, Love Never Dies: How to Reconnect and Make Peace with the Deceased



In Memory Of John Neill
Just to share one more story, I was privileged to spend some of the last days of his life with my dear friend and mentor, John McNeill. John was a priest who wrote a book called Taking a Chance on God and The Church and the Homosexual, who was kicked out of the Jesuit order by Benedict, who was then I believe Cardinal and became Pope later, for being gay. He was an LGBT activist and he changed my life, and the lives of countless other people. Another time, I’ll talk about what he meant to me. I had to leave John the day before he died. I’m just going to share one more story. John loved vichyssoise. It was a soup that he really loved. On the last day before that, as he was really moving toward passing, he just looked up and he said, “vichyssoise.” I made this my mission and I took a taxi 20 miles or something to this one place that was open that had vichyssoise in Fort Lauderdale. I got it for him and brought it back. My dear friend, the activist Brendan Fay and I, late at night, fed that to John on a little sponge, but then we got rid of the sponge because who wants to eat good food off a sponge? We used a tiny spoon. He loved it and he smiled. That was the story of how I got to give a very precious last wish to someone who had helped me and healed me in so many ways. Anyway, that next day, I had to leave. It was the day before John passed and the room was filled with his loved ones, but I gave myself the gift of asking for some moments alone with him. That’s something I learned from the passing of another friend where I didn’t give myself that gift. I bent down toward his ear and I just whispered a stream of pure gratitude to him. I told him how he changed my life, how he brought me back to the me that I had given up in my childhood. I told him how he helped me overcome old childhood shame, not just of being gay, but even a deeper shame at being me. I thanked him for growing me back to the parts of myself that I had given up so many years ago, parts that allowed me the gift of my current personal life and my professional life. He gave that to me. He gave it back to me because of what he saw in me. I felt a resolve never to put our relationship on that old dusty shelf. I just drank him in. I looked into his sweet face and I just filled myself with him. I knew that I would be coming back to visit him. That was a gift that I no longer had to deny myself. I hope that this exercise sounds helpful to you. I hope you try it and use it. I think you’ll find incredible riches from it. I also encourage you if this interests you, to look for Dr. Turndorf’s book, Love Never Dies. Thank you all for listening to this, a very kind of different episode. I look forward to seeing you in the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast.Table of Contents
How To Change The Script Of Your Love Life
Your Myth Of Lost Love: Part 2


Last Episode Recap
Let me begin by recapping what we talked about in the last episode because this is a two-part series. In the last episode, I talked about our scripts that we carry with us in our search for love. They’re deep and profound and that we act out again and again. One of these, I call the myth of lost love, which is the story that we tell ourselves about why we haven’t been loved right, what it says about the world, and what we need to do about it? These scripts are deep and profound things. They truly shape our behavior in amazing ways, and we can change these scripts by bringing wisdom into our search for love. I want to just start by recapping what the myth of lost love is, what we talked about in the last episode. In this episode, we’re going to be talking about how we can deconstruct that myth, and how we can rewire and build a story that makes more sense, that holds us in a better way, that allows us to make better and wiser choices, that allows more freedom and more intimacy. Let me start by just explaining this concept of the myth of lost love. In the ways that we were not seen and the ways that we were not loved right, and we’re human beings in a world filled with pain, suffering, and defense, and so none of us were loved perfectly right. Also, all of us have qualities that are both genius qualities but also deeply challenging to us and to the world. They’re the source of our greatness, but they are also the source of so much struggle and dilemma, because we have to grow into the power, the size, the gentleness, the intensity of these gifts, and whatever they are. Of course, our parents and our caregivers have also been wounded, and have not been able to see us and meet us properly in important ways, no matter how much they loved us. Admitting how you push love away is an act of greatness.CLICK TO TWEETOf course, the world has hurt us in our dating lives and our romantic lives. I think almost all of us have been hurt and often profoundly hurt, so we create this myth of lost love that originates in our childhood that grows and develops in our life and our dating life. It has three parts to it. The first part is it gives us an explanation of what the world is, like the world is a place where I can’t trust, or the world is a place where I am generous again and again, and keep being taken advantage of. The world is a place where this particular quality of mine has never really been seen or cherished and hence, has never felt safe. These are deep down stories that we tell ourselves about what the world is, and really how the world is going to treat us, and particularly, how the world is going to treat us if we show our deepest authentic self. That’s the first part of the myth. I’m doing this briefly because it’s what we talked about in the last episode. The second part of the myth is, what’s wrong with us? When a child is not treated right, they always think, “What’s wrong with me? How did I do this? How did I create this?” Often, we’re told directly or in subtler ways that it is our fault. We learn these deep down messages that way down in our psyche we translate into, “This is what’s wrong with me that I am not loved, seen, honored, or respected, etc.” The third part of the myth is, what do we need to do to protect ourselves so that we are not hurt this way again? So that we can avoid that pain and still find love. Often, these are kind of Byzantine complicated patterns that we create, that end up being self-sabotaging, and they get played out again and again. These are our myths of lost love.
Deconstruction And Rewiring
That said, I want to talk about the deconstruction and the rewiring around the three parts of this myth that we talked about. The first one that we talked about was understanding of what the world is and how the world will treat you when you’re authentic, when you’re vulnerable, when you need, when you’re extra fierce, when you’re extra tender, whatever those most important parts of you are. Out of our picture of what the world is and how we will be treated, we develop attachment styles. Some of the attachment styles that we develop, some of the ways that we develop are as follows. Tell me if any of them or you can tell me if you do the Ask Ken thing, but otherwise, think for yourself about which of these feel like they’re true for you. Here’s a really interesting one that I’m going to start with. I guess this is what it’s like. It’s like you’re in a burning building and you can only take out one thing. In a difficult life, we choose the things that we most need for survival. If what we most need is a sense of freedom, we have to often cut the cords to dependence. If what we most need is interconnectedness, we have to cut the cords to being radically authentic and we’ll have to people please. Each of us makes hard choices of what we’re going to take out of the burning building, and it’s the thing we need the most. One thing that I’ve noticed in my work is that people who have a deep connection to goodness need the world to be a good place, need to see goodness in the world. One way that they survive is a kind of enforced naivete, where they won’t see the reality of how selfish people can be, of how unkind people can be, not everyone but some people, how ethicless some people can be, and how abusive.
Core Gifts
Now, I want to talk about the second part. The second part is what we tell ourselves is wrong with us, that we have created this pain or this problem, or that we have invited it or allowed it. That is the human tendency, is to blame ourselves. This is a really rich one and connects to our core gifts. There’s a lot of complexity, a lot of richness here that I talk about in greater depth in my book, and in many podcast episodes where I speak about core gifts. I’m just going to say briefly that the amazing thing here, the incredible thing here is that the qualities that we decide are the reason that people don’t love us, are almost always connected to our deepest gifts, which I call our core gifts. Those are the parts of us that have a quality of depth, intensity, sensitivity, or differentness that people don’t normally easily know how to handle, including us. They’re the deepest richest parts of us. They are our greatest beauty, and the more we align with those parts and honor them, and kind of live like artists in the presence of those qualities, like a deep sensitivity, a truth-telling, a hunger for accomplishment, achievement or creativity, a passion, an intensity, a tenderness, a humility, a generosity that runs so deep that it’s gotten us in trouble. These are the holy parts of us. These are the powerful parts of us, and the simple, strange question of, what have we told ourselves is wrong with us? Whatever those qualities are, are almost definitely intimately connected with our greatest gifts. If we don’t know how to embrace those qualities, we will be sexually and romantically attracted to people who step on them, deny them, ignore them, or don’t at all understand or appreciate them. The deep journey here and the gift of finding out our answer to that question, and you could take a moment now and pause and think about this. What do you tell yourself are the flaws in you that people just can’t love or betray you or let you down because of, or are too much, or maybe are not strong enough? Those are often the two things. We think we’re too much or we think we’re not enough. Around each of those points, there is a depth of being that’s so big, that maybe the world hasn’t known how to handle it, and we haven’t known how to handle it. Those are our core gifts. The journey here is to name those gifts. To come to understand them like we would understand a child that we have, who is brilliant and gifted, and also struggling with the weight of those gifts. There’s a lot of compassion that we need to hold. Also, a lot of treasuring and renaming again and again of the worth of these gifts. When we do this, we form into a self that can really live in an extraordinary way in the world. Over time, we find as we do this, as we name these gifts, is that when we’re dating, when we’re in relationships, we will notice when those gifts are not being seen. We’ll notice when those gifts are being stepped on or taken advantage of or abused, and we’ll say, “This feels horrible, no.” Instead of doing our old methods of convincing ourselves that we have to change, or convincing ourselves that the world is just this way, and this is all we can expect, we will instead begin to say, “This is not a place where I can feel really at home. I need to do something about that.” When we do that, our search for love changes, and our life changes. That is why this is really a kind of almost holy journey because it’s a journey to come back to those most deeply authentic, passionate, tender and sacred parts of ourselves that really as we do, our mission in life becomes clearer, and our capacity to love in a wiser way and choose in a wiser way also develops. That’s the second piece of how we blame ourselves, which can lead us to seeing what our deepest gifts are. The third one is then, what are the defense mechanisms that we create? What are the structures? What are the flight patterns from intimacy? What are the things that we do to look for love based on that myth? How do we behave when we believe this is what the world is? How do we behave when we feel shame around some of our deepest core gifts? What are the things that we do? What is the choreography of our behavior around those wounds? This is an incredibly rich and complex question, but I think I could just ask this in a way that you could think about briefly and just see what pops up. What are your ways of unconsciously, or maybe even consciously, pushing love away? What are the patterns that are yours by which you push love away even though you’re looking for it? You can take a minute, you can pause and think about it, but I want to say, I think it behooves all of us to become a student of our fear of intimacy and to really know the ways that we do this because we all do. I think that that is an act of greatness. It is to be able to swallow and admit, “These are the ways I push love away. This is the choreography of how I protect myself in ways that maybe aren’t the wisest, but they are the best I have had, and this is what I could consider doing differently.” I think that’s an act of greatness and humility. I think that the bang for your buck that you get in your intimacy journey when you tackle these things is absolutely huge. Each one of these things that we’ve talked about, your search for love and your intimacy life, will change profoundly as you embrace these pieces. You can see why this path is really a path to your own greatness, a path to the deepest parts of you, and God knows love is one of the deepest parts of all of us. Thank you so much for listening. I encourage you to think about all of these things and explore them further. I wish you blessings in your deep, profound, precious, and important learning journey around your search for love. I look forward to speaking with you in the next episode.Table of Contents
- Myth Of Lost Love
- The Story We Tell Ourselves As Children
- Why We Deserve Punishment
- How To Protect And Defend Ourselves
How To Discover Your Personal “Myth Of Lost Love”
Understanding Your Core Beliefs About Romantic Love

Myth Of Lost Love
Today, I’m going to be talking about what I call the myth of lost love, which is the deep story that we tell ourselves about who we are, who the world is, and how we need to behave in order to protect ourselves, and be loved. I call it a myth because it has an ancient depth. It touches our heartstrings in a very deep way. There are universal themes, but it’s also very personal. Like a myth, it shapes the way we approach our lives, and in this case, our romantic lives and our entire intimacy life. What we’re going to do in this episode is I’m going to talk about the different components of the myth of lost love. I’m going to ask you some questions as we go, and you can just quickly think of what your response is. By the end of this episode, you will have a much richer understanding of your myth of lost love and how it shapes your romantic life, and also where it came from. There’s a lot of rich stuff here. You’re also going to be learning how your myth of lost love points to you, what your deepest core gifts are that you have not yet been able to embrace. It’s exciting and profound stuff. This is going to be a two-part episode. In the second episode, we’ll be talking about how we can change the story of our myth of lost love. To have it finally become a story that works and heals us, and adds to the love in our life instead of ultimately subtracting from it, and that includes self-love. In this episode, we’re going to talk about what the myth of lost love is. You’re going to identify yours, and in that, you will get glimpses of your deepest core gifts, which lie at the heart of your entire intimacy journey. The act of suppressing hidden parts of us is an act of quiet violence against our deepest being.CLICK TO TWEETThe Story We Tell Ourselves As Children
Each one of us has created this myth of lost love, which is a life-defining story that we use to explain why we were not loved the way we needed to be when we were children, why we were not loved the way we needed to be by our romantic partners, and what we can do to repair that pain or protect ourselves from experiencing it again. This myth comes alive whenever we’re in a relationship that really matters to us, and it can stir us down to our very core. I’m going to share a story, and that story is going to illustrate some of the different points of the myth of lost love.Why We Deserve Punishment
The first dynamic in the myth of lost love that we create is the story we tell ourselves as children, about the ways in which the world is an unsafe and unloving place. Debbie’s story. Debbie’s dad divorced her mother when Debbie was about seven years old. She was a single parent with four older boys, and one very sensitive little girl to raise. Her mom just didn’t have the time or the energy for her. She seemed angry a lot of the time. Debbie’s many attempts to show love to her mother were sometimes returned, but often they were rebuffed or ignored completely. Debbie really only remembered a few times when her mother showed her real affection. Sometimes, her mom would actually humiliate her when Debbie showed her need, her longing for connection, her soft side. As a result, Debbie ended up experiencing the world as a place that had an essential coldness, and where the warmth of real love was mostly unattainable. She developed a myth of lost love to explain why her mother’s love was being denied to her. She came to the conclusion that the world was a cold place that rewarded need and vulnerability with humiliation, and rewarded the lack of need and the lack of vulnerability with success. That’s the first part of how we come to see and understand the world based on our experiences. You might want to take a minute to think about that. We’re going to get to this one more deeply in a moment, but what are the parts of you that you felt were not treasured or honored at home, in your deep love relationships, or in the world in general? What did that teach you or tell you? What did you decide about the world because of that? Some people decide that the world is a cold place and shut down in particular ways, and protect themselves because they hold onto a sense of reality. Other people, for very different reasons, can experience abuse, neglect and those same things. What they need to hold on to is a sense of goodness of the world. Even if it’s a losery, those people approach the world with a kind of naiveté. Not believing that someone would hurt them even if their gut instincts are this person isn’t safe. These are just some of the ways that we create a myth. That second myth is a myth of, “If I’m good enough, if I’m kind enough, if I’m loving enough, this other person will be different.” My mom is a Holocaust survivor. She had that. Her thing when she was eight years old was, “If the Nazis could see my goodness, they would never hurt me.” There is cruelty, unkindness, and vast amounts of pain and suffering in the world. Each of us develops a story.
How To Protect And Defend Ourselves
The third part of the myth of lost love is that it tells us how to protect and defend ourselves in an unsafe world. As a kid, Debbie had to learn how to be quiet in the face of her mom’s anger. She had to be the best little girl in the world. The anger that took root in Debbie as a child came into full bloom in Debbie as an adult. She still wanted to be the best girl in the world, but she vowed not to be humiliated again. Every time she felt vulnerable, even if she felt afraid of being unloved, in other words, she felt vulnerable and she didn’t express it. She was afraid that if she did, she would be hurt. She would mount a kind of preemptive strike. She would have a sudden kind of prickliness or over the top anger, and it would undermine and destroy each new budding relationship for her. Now, there’s a few pieces here. There is her need, her vulnerability, and her soft heart. There is the ferocity of her self-protection and pride. All of which are cherished, precious, and essential parts of us, and Debbie in this case. Here is the thing that is also so rich and powerful. It’s that because these core gifts are so demanding, and because they get us in trouble, we try to leave them behind so we could be normal and like everyone else, and be loved and be whatever it is that we think we need to be, which never works and bites us in the butt in an essential, profound, and ongoing way, but because we leave these parts of us behind, they don’t grow up. There’s a quality of immaturity that is often stuck with them. Part of the work of reclaiming these gifts is not just thinking, “I have these fabulous gifts, and anyone who doesn’t get them in whatever form they’re in, just doesn’t love me.” That’s kind of an exaggeration because we need to teach these gifts how to grow up in the world, how to have legs, how to express themselves with more courage, with more kindness, and with more integration. That comes with the first step, that is unequivocally to treasure these parts of ourselves, to name them, to identify them, and to look for people who in an essential way, love those parts of us, but then the work does become to help those parts of ourselves grow up, and become more mature, and be able to stand as entities, as part of our mission in the world.
Table of Contents
Deeper Dating Q&A: Expert Advice For All Your Questions About Love, Dating And Sex
What Do You Do When It’s Almost Working…But Almost Is Still Not Enough

Moving Past The Regret And Confusion
One person said to me that she really appreciates my work, which I really appreciate hearing, and that after reading my book and doing this work, she met her husband who is a truly wonderful guy. All of the qualities of inspiration that I mentioned and that I write about, she felt like were really, really there. It still feels like those qualities were really there, but she needed time and space, and he pushed it too fast. That left her not feeling safe. He was very uncomfortable and didn’t feel safe with the unknowing space. He really pushed things fast, and she went along with that feeling, kind of horrible, even though he was such a great guy. She said the engagement was horrible for that reason. She felt anxious, she felt pushed, she felt unsafe, but they got married. The best antidote to old hypnosis is a current relationship with reality.CLICK TO TWEETAlthough he was a wonderful person and they had a relationship that was good in so many ways, in this essential way, it wasn’t. She never felt safe. She never was able to get over the fact that she felt pushed into getting married too soon. They did couples therapy. At a certain point, then he gave up and he said, “I can never be who you want me to be.” He gave up and they separated. They have been kind since that separation. They have been decent, but she is left feeling deeply regretful and wondering. She asked, “Was I too much of a perfectionist? My soul didn’t feel safe, but how do I move past the regret and the confusion that I feel now that I’ve lost him, and the relationship is over? I lost him because he felt like I never really was able to fully love him or accept him or embrace the relationship.” This is so poignant. I want to say first something that I say to people a lot. I want to congratulate you and acknowledge your shift that you chose someone with such qualities of inspiration. It’s a huge deal. It is a shift. It means everything, even if this relationship didn’t work. That said, if you’re feeling such deep regret and confusion, and I want to say this to anybody who has lost or ended a relationship that felt like an attraction of inspiration. When there was a deep sense of safety and awareness of that person’s goodness, and there was potential, and there was attraction where you left or it didn’t end up working out, or you couldn’t embrace it, and you’re feeling deep regret and confusion, you might want to explore what was going on there. You might want to explore the possibility of trying again. I think that if we’re not sure, it’s worth it. We tell ourselves we need to move past a relationship, but some people are very good at knowing when they need to move past their relationship. They still feel, in a particular case, this regret and confusion. What I would say is there was a wound spot hit by the two of you, where he could not give you enough space. What that created for you was untenable. You gave yourself up in a way by saying, “Yes.” That resentment when we give ourselves up can be so deep and so profound. I do think if you want, it would be worth it. No matter what, it is worth exploring the giving up of your own pacing because your pacing is precious, and it’s central. Just like with sex and intimacy, we have to honor that pacing, even if it’s hard for the other person. Something to look at is where you gave up your boundaries. That’s something for you to look at no matter what. I would say if there’s more discussion to be had with him, have it. If there’s another chance that seems reasonable and possible, you might want to try for that. Even if it doesn’t work, you will be clearer after doing that. If someone is not abusive, it’s a good relationship, and you’re still not sure – there’s no addiction, there’s no untreated mental illness, there’s goodness, there’s decency, and you’re not sure, you might want to try again. You might want to explore the possibility of trying again. I don’t know about you, but I know a number of people who have tried again and had it work. I know a number of people who have tried again and had it not work but got clearer. In the case of an essentially good relationship, if you feel drawn to go back, you might want to consider doing that. I did a whole podcast episode on this. I also do think that at the end of a relationship like that, where there was at least a big amount of inspiration, rightness and trust, it’s worth it to think, “What did I learn? How might there have been my fear of intimacy that played a role in this? What will I know next time? What will I do differently next time?” That’s something you might want to think about even now. Was there an attraction of inspiration that you weren’t able to sustain? What are your reflections and what you would have done differently? You might want to take a minute to think about that right now. You can even pause the recording if you like.
Biologically Incompatible
Someone else asked, “Are there people who are just biologically not compatible?” She says, “With my boyfriend, from the very beginning, I had issues with his breath and smell.” She said, “At this point, I hate his smell. Is this the wave of distancing?” For those of you who don’t know, that’s when you meet someone and they’re really available, really decent and really trustable. The excitement feels like it’s not there and you just want to flee. The reason is often a deep fear of availability. I’ve spoken about this and what to do about it a lot in previous podcasts. Anyway, she said, “I am just now completely repulsed by his smell. I don’t want to have sex. He’s a wonderful person and I’m afraid to go deeper. Is this a biological incompatibility? What do I do?” This is a really rich question. Of course, I’m going to start with the simplest part here. If someone’s breath is bad, that probably means that they have gum decay or tooth decay. That is something that’s addressable that you have every right in the world to ask them to address. It’s hard to do, but you really do deserve this. If they have body odor of any sort, it’s the same thing – you have a right to ask that they take care of that. It’s important to do that, but that might not be this. Although the breath thing does sound like it might be that. I did a little bit of research into this and found out some very fascinating things. One piece of this is that we have a sequence of more than a hundred immune system genes known as MHC, Major Histocompatibility Complex. What science has discovered is that we are most attracted to the smell of people who are immunologically dissimilar. In other words, their MHC profile is different than ours. In cases where the MHC profile is very similar, there’s going to be less attraction to the person’s smell and maybe less attraction to the person as a whole. Interestingly, there’s also more chance of immunologically healthier offspring between partners whose MHC complex is dissimilar. People whose MHC complex is more similar are more likely to have children who are less disease resistant. Interestingly too, the only time that that awareness is not there fully for women is when they’re on birth control. When they’re on birth control pills, supposedly their ability to get the scent dissatisfaction that they experienced with people whose MHC is different than theirs. They don’t have that ability if they’re on birth control pills. That’s an interesting thing too. There are also other factors, like for example, trauma. When we have trauma memories, when we have trauma experiences, certain kinds of smells can trigger us, or fears can come up and they can manifest themselves in ways like a repulsion towards someone’s smell. This is a concept of the wave. Often, when we meet someone who is available and we become afraid, we start feeling repulsed by them. This is something that is also worth exploring. This is so multifactorial. Please don’t think that we are just so much victims of biology in our MHC complexes because we have to look, could it be a fear of intimacy? The last thing that I would say is if you have looked at these issues, if you don’t think it’s the wave, if you have this person address hygiene issues and you know that it’s not necessarily an illness related issue or a hygiene-related issue, or a gum disease-related issue, and you just cannot get past their smell, and this goes on, you do need to not torture yourself and just accept that that’s the way things are. I also want to say something else too, that there may be ways that you can be with the person that are very sexy and very hot that somehow bypass some of the smell issues. There might be parts of their body that you don’t like to smell and other parts that you don’t feel that way. If this is a really special relationship, once again, I say, look into all those possibilities. Ultimately, you can’t be with someone who you just feel repulsed by their smell, and some of the other factors that we mentioned. Deeper love begins by the way you handle the things your intuition says are off.CLICK TO TWEETEmotional Sobriety
Someone else said that she’s done a lot of recovery work around emotional sobriety. She had parents who were abused and addicted. She said she’s proud of the work that she’s done because she’s lost her taste for attractions of deprivation, which I celebrate hearing. She doesn’t have any attractions of deprivation anymore. That doesn’t happen for her in her romantic life. She said she’s two months in with a kind and wonderful guy, and she feels now it’s the next step. It’s not being with someone who was an attraction of deprivation and going through all of the roller coaster of that. This is something different. She’s with a kind and wonderful guy. She feels like she doesn’t have it in her to believe that she is loved. She said that the excitement of chaos also isn’t there. I want to say something about this, and I’m wondering if any of you relate to this. Have you ever been in a situation where you’ve been with someone who loved you, and was available and was present, and you couldn’t take it in? You couldn’t really believe it. I want to say a few things about that. The biggest thing that I want to say is, on some level, that’s okay. That is human. For those of us, and I include myself in this, who have had a particular kind of trauma in life, there’s some way that some parts of us believe in the love, and other parts just can’t. It’s like putting two positive ends of a magnet together and they can’t connect. I know that I have parts of me to this day, thirteen years into the relationship with my husband, where I cannot believe in his love for me, even though it’s there and it’s present, so I create bypasses. Those bypasses are all the ways that my body knows I’m loved, that I know that my nervous system knows that I’m safe, and I’m treasured because of his behaviors, because of all the ways that my nervous system senses what my mind can’t always believe. I trust those pathways and I follow them. Also, I talk about it. When I hit these junctures where it’s hard for me to believe in his love for me, I talk about it. In fact, I’ll share that the night before we got married, I took a walk with him to the beach and I said, “I love you. I know you love me, but some part of me doesn’t believe it. We’re getting married tomorrow and some part of me is still too afraid to believe it.” It was great that I said that and he made space for it. I just want to make space for the parts of all of us, where we don’t believe yet that we’re loved, where we can’t take it in so that we can create pockets, where at those times we don’t ride on our cognition. We ride more maybe on our nervous system where we essentially feel safe, or maybe we just take our partner’s hand and be quiet together. A therapist said to me something so wise once, and I love it. It’s been so useful to me as a therapist. She said, “The best antidote to an old hypnosis is a current relationship with reality.” If your old hypnosis is in the truth of not being loved, the truth of non-availability, the truth of abuse, by being with your partner in ways that don’t feel suffocating, that don’t push you and don’t pressure you, but let your nervous system and your heart, or maybe your skin, because touch helps so much, register and realize the care that is there for you. That helps us get past those cognitive places where we can’t get it or believe it, or those nervous system places where we can’t believe it, or those deep trauma places where we can’t believe it. We do not have to get rid of those, but what is good to do is to be able to hold them with cupped hands, with non-judgment, and to learn from them the language of how we get past them, how we hold them, how we stay connected, even when parts of us don’t feel connected. That’s just so much of the story of real intimacy that we don’t get taught. This listener also shared some feedback on a previous episode. The episode of the interview I did with Mike Moran where date rape was mentioned. She said that that was kind of upsetting for her to hear the words date rape, because date rape minimizes the fact that rape is rape, and the fact that it happened on a date doesn’t at all change the reality of rape. That phrase date rape is a very minimizing and disrespectful term. I want to thank you so much for that. I really appreciate that. It makes perfect sense and I learned something. Thanks for your bravery in sharing that. I wanted to share it with my listeners’ community and apologize for that and acknowledge that.
Not That Almost Man
The last question that I’m going to take, and there are so many more, and I will get to them as well as I can in the time that I have. This is a very poignant one. It’s someone who is talking about facing the end of a relationship. “After about three years of being mostly single,” she said in her words, “I met someone who was not that almost man, almost loving, almost available, almost kind, almost respectful. He was not an almost man.” In fact, they had visualized each other, and they shared with each other things that they wrote in their visualization process of qualities they’d want their partner to have that articulated the other person. These are two people who are deeply intuitive, and each had visualized the other. She said that, “It has been beautiful and I celebrate that. That is wonderful.” She said one month in, after a day of planning their future together, her partner who’s deeply intuitive said he needed to take a pause, and it’s been about a month now, because he somehow felt that there was something that was not right. He wanted time. He wanted to honor that he was certain that it was not fear, a kind of unconscious fear. He wanted to take the time in that month to honor himself and to explore what it was that didn’t feel right to his intuition. What she said is, “For me, I’m very intuitive too, and my intuition is saying, ‘Yes, this is good and this is right.’” One thing I want to say about intuition, and this is something I’ve also talked about in a previous podcast, is sometimes it’s hard to know what is intuition and what is fear. What is intuition and what is a need that doesn’t want to face reality? Those things that we think are intuition can be blindingly powerful, but when it’s an arena where a lot is at stake, we can’t always trust our intuition. I feel that very strongly. I think that that is true in early relationships. To the person who asked the question, it might be that your intuition is based on a kind of sensing something wrong too that frightens you that you don’t want to face. It may be that his intuition is exactly that. All I’m saying is that this is a point that it’s good to check in with the friends who know us and love us, and hear what they have to say, because they may say or this guy’s friends might say to him, “You have done this before and don’t mess this one up.” Maybe your friends might say to you something similar, or maybe your friends will say, “No, I get it. This really feels right between the two of you.” All I’m saying is when it comes to big decisions where there’s a heavy charge and especially situations where there’s been trauma, struggling or suffering around something that matters as much as a relationship, get help. Don’t trust that your intuition is your intuition. You might ultimately trust it but get those side-view mirrors going, where you can get focus from other people because you do, WE do have blind spots. Often, those blind spots feel so much like intuition. I am hoping that this guy is not taking a complete break from the relationship for a month. If he is, I think that’s a warning sign because the best antidote to an old hypnosis is through a current relationship with reality. His being with you is how he’s going to come to understand which pieces of this might be things that don’t feel safe, that might be just historical for him, which are pieces that feel true. If they are true, I want to say that as we progress in a relationship, we reach a point where there are deep flaws or off-nesses that we feel in our relationship. That is what’s supposed to happen. That is when deeper love begins by the way you handle the things that your intuition says are off. That’s the meat and the potatoes of the heart of intimacy. Not fleeing and going into a cave and thinking you’re going to work it out yourself, but working it out with support, with side-view mirrors, and in relationship with the other person. What I would want to say to this guy is, “Yes, your intuition probably is telling you something is off. Explore that, but don’t just explore it in your head, explore it in the relationship.” That’s what I would say to the two of you. I hope that that is something that can happen. I also want to say that I love these questions, because these questions reflect people who have lost their taste for unhealthy relationships and are now dealing with the challenges that come up in relationships that are basically good, even if those relationships don’t work. I just want to acknowledge that progress. I want to ask each one of you to think about what touched you in this episode. What related to your experience? Think about are there any pieces of wisdom in this, any insights that you feel you want to take and apply to your life that feel true to you? Take a minute and think about that. I want to thank you all. I look forward to seeing you in the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast. For those folks who are single, go to DeeperDating.com. It is a new place that we have created for thoughtful, caring, single people to meet. I look forward to speaking with you again soon. Blessings on your intimacy journey- Studies On Swipe-Based Dating Apps
- Pushing Love Away While Looking For It
- Circuitries Of Attraction
- How To Do Swiping Differently
Swipe Circuitry: How Online Dating Trains Us To Stay Single
How To Stop Fleeing Love While You Seek It Online

Studies On Swipe-Based Dating Apps
Let me start out with some pretty amazing statistics. Research from the West Sydney University and the University of Sydney has directly linked the experience of swipe-based dating apps to higher rates of depression and psychological distress. In 2017, there was a study that linked the use of Tinder with negative self-esteem and body shame, but interestingly, not leading to any positive change in diet or eating habits. Another study showed that the app Grindr was way at the top of the apps that made people feel most unhappy. Seventy-seven percent of them admitted that it made them feel miserable. Tinder was up there too, but here is something interesting too, is that 70% of gay relationships began online. Clearly, there is good here. There is potential here. There is capacity here, but there are patterns that get sculpted by what I call swipe circuitry, that gets sculpted by dating apps that do swiping, and get sculpted by dating apps in general. Here’s another wild statistic. Less than 10% of matches in swipe apps are consummated with even a hello, because the users keep playing instead of messaging the matches that were already made. This is huge. This is deep and this is so symbolic of the incredible possibilities that exist in online dating, and the behaviors that get sculpted out of these apps that pull us away from really being able to make use of these incredible resources. Less than 10% even get a hello, and these are matches. These are matches that were made. I think that speaks to the gamifying of swipe apps and what happens to us.Pushing Love Away While Looking For It
I’m going to talk about this a little more because it’s really interesting what happens to us. This is what it is, it’s the ways in which we push love away while we’re looking for it. I know for me, this is one of the most profound realizations that I had to have, was that in my desperate and ongoing and relentless search for a relationship, I was pushing love away. I was trusting numbers and I was trusting in getting in great shape. I was trusting meeting lots of people. I was trusting in all of those things, that because they have nothing to do with intimacy, ultimately failed me in my search for intimacy. Unavailability has a spice, a kind of umami, that is so lovely, so exciting, so delicious, and so compelling, and really feels like love.CLICK TO TWEETWhether you’re using swiping apps or not, whether you’re using online dating as a tool or not, I think these questions are very powerful. How in the ways that I’m searching for love might I be pushing love away? What are my metaphors for this concept of getting a match and 9 out of 10 times, not even responding? I’ll tell you what some of mine were that I’m clear on. One was consistently looking for people who were sexy, spicy, attractive, desirable, and did not get me or weren’t available. That was one way that I did that. Another way that I did that was, unconsciously, I fled the possibility of real intimacy with peers who could be available. I don’t know if it seemed more boring or claustrophobic or scary to me, but what I told myself is that those people were not exciting enough. That’s a really interesting point, I think. Unavailability has a spice, a kind of umami that is so lovely, so exciting, so delicious, and so compelling, and really feels like love. Not so much the experience of living in love, but the experience of longing for love and feeling like it’s almost in reach, but not quite. When you fall for someone who’s not available, there’s no fear, and that is such a relief. I know that was such a relief for me. Unavailable people, I had no fear. Now, if it was someone available, I would start to feel claustrophobic. I would start to lose interest. I would start to feel bored, and the glory of unavailable people was that I could just feel delightful, excitement, and attraction with none of that fear, because there’s a gulp that has to happen. There’s a kind of like a swallowing of discomfort when you go through the process of having someone who is a stranger, who’s available and interested, and wants to enter into your world, actually, go from being a stranger to being someone you deeply bond with is hard and it’s scary. Research shows that the degree to which we don’t yet really love ourselves or honor ourselves is the degree to which we’re going to be attracted to people who also don’t really love us, or honor us fully, or are not available. The degree to which we don’t love ourselves enough is the degree to which, when we meet people who are interested and available, we’re going to want to push them away. We’ll have a deep discomfort. This is what I call the wave of distancing. I’ve talked about it a lot. I think it’s one of the greatest, if not THE greatest saboteur of healthy new love. These apps that are constantly bringing you to the next, to the new, are very powerful for getting us over the discomfort that comes with availability. I think that’s a huge reason why so many of these matches aren’t consummated. It’s like, then I’ll have to talk to this person, then I might have to feel obligated to this person. I might not like this person. They might like me and I won’t like them, and that’s kind of exhausting, and you don’t want to have that happen, or maybe they’re kind of exciting and I’m scared because they might not like me.
Circuitries Of Attraction
I think something that is very important to understand, if we are trying to have a conscious and effective dating life and search for love, is this concept of circuitries of attraction. I think that all of us have different circuitries of attraction. The two big ones that I talk about a lot are attractions of deprivation and attractions of inspiration. Just to briefly describe those, I’ve spoken about them a lot in different episodes, an attraction of deprivation is where the sexiness, and the attraction, and the desire, at least in part, springs from the sense that someone is almost available, or is almost going to like us. They’re just somehow out of reach, and that is so sexy. It brings up such deep longing inside us, or they don’t fully accept us, or they accept us, but they don’t treasure us, or they miss our jokes and they miss our ideas, and they don’t get kind of our unique genius or our way of seeing the world. We feel like we are not seen or loved or cherished enough, but we almost are enough. We try to get that person to love us more fully, to get our jokes, to understand our unique kind of intelligence, to appreciate our beauty. You know, when you have to try that hard, it means that it’s not working. It’s hard to describe how sexy these attractions are and how they pull at us, and how they feel like love, but these are what I call attractions of deprivation. It’s a circuitry all of us have. It’s like that playing hard to get kind of thing activates that circuitry. So much of the men’s seduction techniques are based on triggering that circuitry in women. So much of women’s seduction techniques to get a man are based on not being too available and all those kinds of things. Lots more to say about that in another episode, but the research clearly shows that playing hard to get doesn’t work. We can talk about that more in other episodes. Anyway, those are attractions of deprivation, and how many years or months have we spent lost in those attractions? One of the things that happen in those attractions is that we are branded again and again with our feelings of insecurity. They’re branded more deeply into us. They prove the point that we’re not enough, but if we try harder, we might become enough, which translates into we are essentially just not enough. This is a powerful circuitry. It’s one that gets triggered easily, but for almost all of us, it is not our only circuitry. We have another circuitry, which I call attractions of inspiration. That’s when we’re attracted to somebody because of their goodness, their decency, their authenticity, qualities like creativity and originality, but the kind of good qualities, the qualities of decency, goodness, truth-telling, availability, and the kind of consistent, essential, liking and loving of us. Now, this is a different circuitry of attraction. When you fall for someone who's not available, there's no fear, and that is such a relief.CLICK TO TWEETHere’s a really interesting point. The people that kind of grab at you and excite you deeply and intensely from the beginning often do so because unconsciously, you recognize that they’re not going to love you the way that you want to be loved. That reminds you of ways in your life that you weren’t loved the way that you want to be loved, and that’s very compelling. With attractions of inspiration, that desperate, sexy edge is not there. There’s a sense of goodness. There’s a sense of growing care. There can be such deep, rich, wonderful, fabulous lust. I’m absolutely not saying that can’t be there, but it’s a skill that we need to develop to allow that to happen in an attraction of inspiration, because for many of us, we just want to get out of there. We want to flee.How To Do Swiping Differently
Now, in the land of online dating, what this means is that the people that you swipe most quickly “yes” on, the people that you swipe right on most quickly, are the people who are your scratch-the-itch type in most cases. I’m going to talk about how to do this, how to do swiping differently, but assuming you just kind of go with the sculpted behavior that comes out of this, the people that you’ll swipe right on will often be those real scratch-the-itch types, and those are often attractions of deprivation. All of this happens unconsciously, but it happens. This is not always the case, but it’s often the case. You just recognize that tiny little smirk, maybe that drop of arrogance that’s there, that little bit of superiority that like, you don’t quite name yet, but there’s something sexy there. A distance, a pullback that just grabs you. I know all of these so well from my own experiences. You have to look differently for an attraction of inspiration. You need to look for inspiration. You need to look for the qualities of decency, stability, values that you love. You need to look for these things. At a certain point, in my intensives and my courses, there’s a certain point where people reach where they’ve kind of explored their attractions of deprivation, their attractions of inspiration, and they make a pledge, and the pledge is, “No more attractions of deprivation. No more. I won’t do that again. I’m going to close the door on that no matter how sexy it seems. I’m only going to pursue my attractions of inspiration, people with deep goodness, decency, integrity, and a growing sense of availability.”
Table of Contents
2 Wonderful Ways To Heal Your Inner Conflicts
Wisdom-Hacks to Soothe Pain, Learn Love, and Find Healing

Holding With Cupped Hands
I’m going to start with the first one now. This is one that I call “Holding with Cupped Hands”. If you’ve listened to a number of my podcasts, or if you’ve been to any of my classes or intensives, you’ve heard this concept before. It’s very precious. It’s very seminal. It’s very foundational to this approach. What it is, is being able to hold your humanity in the middle of conflict or difficulty with this sense of dignity, compassion, and caring. We’re going to do the hand motions. Hopefully, you’re not in public so that you could do this to get a sense of it. What I’d like you to do is to imagine that there is an issue that you’re dealing with. Go ahead and pick an issue that you’re dealing with in your life right now. Not a really hugely traumatic one. Maybe one that’s somewhat annoying or somewhat challenging, but not bigger than that. We’re going to think about how you hold this problem, knowing that the way that you will hold it is going to sculpt the outcome of how you grow around it to a large degree. If you imagine holding it with flat hands, just take your hands and open them up and hold them flat. No kindness, no warmth, just flat hands. Imagine this issue sitting there in this cold open space. Nothing really happens. Take your hands and imagine squeezing this problem tight, like trying to squeeze it into a solution. I think we all know what that feels like to try to squeeze something into some kind of premature or prefab solution that feels violent, colder or unkind to do. In the long run, it's the act of honoring that's the antidote to our bewilderment and the path to our own unique genius.CLICK TO TWEETNow, take your hands and hold them cupped like you were cupping holding a baby bird, and now just experience or imagine holding whatever this issue is with cupped hands, not worrying about a solution but just holding it in that way. How does that feel different? If you’re imagining doing it because you’re in a public space, how do you imagine that would feel different? This act of holding with cupped hands is one of the practices that in my intensives and my work with clients, we do often, we do again and again. We don’t only have to do this with problems or difficulties. The act of holding our humanity with cupped hands. When we do that, there’s a slowing down. There’s a connecting to maybe the sadness of our humanity, the decency, the goodness of our humanity. There’s something kind in it, and there’s something immensely soothing. It’s that amazing experience of being a good parent to yourself. It’s something I heard about for years and years, and didn’t get until I learned these processes. Maybe I didn’t learn them until I became a dad, and found out what that meant to hold your child’s heart and emotions with cupped hands. Take a minute right now and notice, recognize whatever it is you’re feeling at the moment. Just let yourself imagine holding it with cupped hands. You could do this physical symbol of holding your hands cupped like you were holding a baby bird, and imagine holding your heart and your humanity in your hands in that way. Let yourself feel that. I want to share with you some of the things that will happen for you, I believe, if you practice this. One thing that will happen will be that there will be a sense of dignity in you just being you, nothing other than you. In your quirkiness, in your craziness, in your sadness, in your sweetness, in your joy, in your excitement, in your whatever. There’s a way that you’ll be making space for the reality that a being who is just like you exists in the world.
Holding Both
Now, I want to talk about another process. This is heavy stuff, I know. This is a process which I called “Holding Both”. It’s a process that we can do when we have conflicting sides, and God knows we all have a lot of conflicting sides. This is a process that you can do when you have two different conflicting sides. Why don’t you take a minute right now and imagine two different parts of yourselves that are both real and true but are conflicting. Maybe you have a part of you that is shy and afraid to speak out, and it’s real. It’s really a part of you. It affects and influences your life, and then you have another part of you that is fierce. The act of self-honoring may be challenging, but ultimately, it's the most comforting path of all.CLICK TO TWEETI know someone who calls that part of herself, the pirate queen. A part of yourself that wants to express things and does express things, that needs to express things. That would be one example of two conflicting parts. Maybe another set of conflicting parts would be a part of you that craves closeness, intimacy, and approval, and another part of you that craves freedom and truth. At different times, those parts pull in really different directions. The freedom and truth part might want independence, might want to say things that are going to get you in trouble, or maybe even hurt other people’s feelings, but they’re the truth for you. The other part of you doesn’t want to cause pain, wants connection, wants affiliation. It doesn’t want to hurt people. That’s another example of two different parts. Maybe you have a sexual part that’s wild, crazy, free and expressive, and another sexual part of you that’s private, quiet and deeply internalized. That would be another example. There are so many different examples of different parts of ourselves. A part that needs to be quiet that is deeply quiet, and another part that’s crazy, social and bubbly, all different parts. I’d like you to take a minute now, and think of two parts of you that are different and can get into conflict. They each want and need what they want and need, and don’t fit well together.
Table of Contents
- The Hunger To Be Accepted By Our Ultimate Parent
- The Hunger To Be Shared
- The Hunger To Cultivate Our Gift’s Opposite
- The Hunger For Discipline And Development
- The Hunger For Connectedness With The World
How To Empower Your Deepest Intimacy Gifts
The Five Essential Needs Of Your Core Gifts


The Hunger To Be Accepted By Our Ultimate Parent
To thrive in this world, each gift that we have needs to be nourished in five particular ways. As I run through these five ways, just notice if any idea strikes a deep chord in you and if it does, again, you might just want to pause just to reflect on its personal meaning for you. The first thing that your Core Gifts need, first and foremost, is to feel accepted by their ultimate parent and that’s you, but that’s not always so simple because we get frightened by the intensity of our passion, for example. We get punished for the intensity of our passion, or we get punished for speaking truth, or we get punished for living and acting outside our prescribed gender roles, or we get stepped on because of our tenderness. Your Core Gifts are the most tender, sensitive, and passionate parts of you.CLICK TO TWEETSo many different ways that we have been trained that these most precious parts of ourselves, the most original and true and essential parts of ourselves are embarrassing, get us in trouble, hurt us, can’t be shown, can’t be seen, etc. Maybe you have felt this experience. I know I’ve been frightened by the intensity of my passion, all different kinds of passion. I know that I have felt many times that my heart was too tender to survive in the cold commerce of day-to-day life. Maybe you’ve felt something like that too, or that fear that if you really shared what you thought, and felt or wanted to express, that you’d be rejected or punished or misunderstood. All of these things point to our truth, our genius, our heart, our Core Gifts, and our authenticity. You know, many of us have been deeply hurt many times in each of the ways that I just mentioned. We learn to treat our gifts almost like children that we secretly love but publicly can feel embarrassed by. We treat our gifts gingerly. We create airbrushed versions of them that won’t get us in trouble. Most of us feel ambivalent about our Core Gifts and we know they’re the truest parts of ourselves but they scare us and for good reason because they are powerful, fierce, true, and essential, and spring from roots that are so not prefab. They’re so authentic, they’re so original and alive that it’s just scary to go with them. My parents were Holocaust survivors. I’ve talked about them a number of times. They learned the hard way that weakness meant death and I grew up as a boy in the ‘50s and the ‘60s who was a really sensitive kid and I was really ashamed of my sensitivity. I was embarrassed by how I was moved to tears in movies and humiliated by the intensity of my emotional responses to other people’s suffering and pain. So many things, joys and pains, knocked me down at the knees. They were hard for me to bear and I had a beautiful secret world where I loved and treasured these things, but I was also ashamed of them when it came to living them in the world, which meant that socially I was ashamed of them, which meant that there was a circuitry and a pathway that was going to lead to a lot of unhappiness in later years in my romantic life. Going back to then, I knew that my sensitivity was a weakness. Now, I know the opposite is true. I know that my weakness was my lack of respect for my own sensitivity. My weakness was in my terror of dignifying that sensitivity and that’s been one of the greatest, hardest, and richest lessons in my life. That sensitivity is one of my Core Gifts. I think that my best writing and my best work as a teacher and a psychotherapist springs from those very qualities I always thought I had to hide that were mortifying to me.
The Hunger To Be Shared
Another hunger of our Core Gifts is the hunger to be shared. Giving and being given to are not luxuries, they’re imperatives. What water is to a plant, generosity is to your gifts. We all hunger to give. We need to give. We long for children. We long for pets. We long for loved ones because unfettered giving is one of life’s absolute joys. Our Core Gifts must be given and they must touch others, and we must see this happening before we can ever truly feel like we’re worthy. In my many, many, many years of practice as a psychotherapist, I’ve seen that my clients who are generous are the ones who are the most capable of happiness. It’s the ones who cherish and honor and water their generosity that have the happiest and richest lives, not always, but essentially, I find and in the long run, I really find that to be true. Which of your gifts are you longing to share?The Hunger To Cultivate Our Gift’s Opposite
Here’s an interesting one. This is the third gift and that is your gift’s cultivation of its opposite or your cultivation of your gift’s opposite. What do I mean by that? In order for our gifts to have legs in the world, we need to develop their complementary opposite quality inside us. Our tenderness needs bravery if we’re going to ever share it with the world. If we’re visionaries and dreamers, we need to cultivate practicality for our creations to come to life. Practical people need to cultivate their dreamer self in order to create beauty in their lives. A generous person needs to cultivate his, her or their “no”. Really on some level, most of us would just kind of rather not do that work because it’s a hard uphill battle to cultivate the opposite quality of your dominant gifts but when you do it, something magnificent happens. As long as we're alive, our Core Gifts are going to be waiting for us to love them and accept them.CLICK TO TWEETYou feel your self-respect growing. When we do that, we feel more solid, more self-confident and we like ourselves more. It’s that feeling of mastery which feels so good and is so central to a life that works. We feel more like adults, but we maintain the kid inside us as well. Our core gift properties will always probably remain dominant, and that’s fine because perfection isn’t the goal, a rich life where we can take care of ourselves is. To help our gifts mature in the world, we need to help cultivate their opposite, so that we can use them more wisely. This is something really interesting. The less you’ve cultivated the opposite quality to your gifts, the more you’re going to be sexually and romantically attracted to people who carry that opposite quality in an extreme and not so great way. For example, somebody who’s really generous of spirit but can’t say no, is going to tend to be attracted to someone who is great at taking, but not so great at giving back. The more we cultivate these complementary qualities in ourselves, the more we’ll find ourselves attracted to people who appreciate our gifts and won’t take advantage of us.The Hunger For Discipline And Development
Something else our Core Gifts hunger for is discipline and development. Our Core Gifts long to be respected enough, to be cultivated and developed. They hunger to test themselves to push past fears and obstacles and obstacle illusions. Just like a gifted child hungers to have her gift seen and acknowledged, our gifts hunger for that as well. They hunger for a mentor who honors them and gets them. They hunger for people who delight in their flights of excess, who shelter their vulnerability, and who send them out into the world to create and be shared. Creating that sense of inner-discipline is a rare accomplishment, and it takes time and effort. This is a poem that I really love by the great abstract painter Arthur G. Dove. “We have not yet made shoes that fit like sand nor clothes that fit like water nor thoughts that fit like air. There is much to be done.” Our gifts aren’t stagnant. They really long to take us somewhere. They compel us to take a risk, to turn the next corner, to meet the next enemy, to devour our next limitation. They’re hungry for that. When we learn to call them gifts instead of imperfections, then they find freedom from that kind of crippling carefulness that we can treat them with when we’re timid and afraid. That’s when they become joyously, ferociously hungry for the next new learning, and that’s when life becomes truly exciting. I want to say something else about this too is that our Core Gifts have a quality of joyful excess. Not all Core Gifts, but many of them do. When we’re in touch with our Core Gifts, we get silly, we get ridiculous, we get playful, we get sensual, we get creative, we laugh, we cry.The Hunger For Connectedness With The World
There’s a quality of bigness and vibrancy and a kind of enthusiastic excess that is just such a central part of one of the things that our gifts need, just one, but one of the things that our gifts need in the world. Now, I want to talk about the final hunger that our Core Gifts have. These hungers all include connectedness with the world, connectedness with people who treasure them, who can play with them, whose gifts we can cultivate. I think that’s kind of assumed in all the things I’m saying, that hunger for living in connection with others in the world.
How To Experience Sexual Healing While You’re Still Single: Sex Therapist Mike Moran
A Powerful Interview With Sex Therapist Mike Moran

Toxic Beliefs
I’ve worked with many people over the years. Straight, gay, transgender, gender fluid, who have recognized in themselves that they sense that this wonderful energy, this wonderful life force that lives within them has been tainted, and has been dampened down. We go on a journey together to learn about how their sexuality, how their sexual energy, their Eros, emerged in their body. How it lives in their body, how it came of being, and then how it lives in their body now, and how the myths, the messages. In our culture, I don’t care if you’re straight, gay, what have you. The culture at large, mainstream culture can do a real number on us. It’s like toxins. We ingest these negative beliefs and messages and myths about sex that can do a number on us and that can hijack our capacity to let that energy flow in us. That’s one of the questions I ask the folks that I work with, “What toxins have you swallowed in the culture at large, in your family culture? What lives within you that, perhaps, you and I can help release, get that poison out of there?” That is beautiful and powerful. Let’s have a moment so that all of the audience could think about this. Maybe you even want to take out a paper and pen, or maybe you’re walking or driving and you want to pause this and think about it, but this is a powerful question. You’re saying, Mike, it’s the very first question, it’s where you start on this journey. Let’s all do this for a minute. Let’s sit with this question that Mike asked. Mike, can I ask you to ask it once more, and then we’ll give people a minute to think or to pause, and reflect on it? Sure, of course. What toxins have you swallowed that are living in your body from the culture at large, from your family, from your friends? What lives in your body that isn’t authentically you? What messages, what poisons do you need to release to come to embrace a healthy, loving, powerful model of sexuality? Beautiful. Here’s something I want to say that I’m going to ask you to address in a minute, Mike, which is for those listeners who have experienced real sexual trauma, this could be a very triggering question. Feel free to answer this in a brief and general way and not to dive in, to be aware of what triggers you. To take care of yourself in the process of answering this question, you might want to answer it on a very broad level. Stand as far away from the trauma as you need to, to be able to look at it, even if it’s from ten miles back and getting a kind of a safe view of it. I wanted to put that in for people who’ve experienced trauma because it’s a rich and important question we all should be able to ask. It doesn’t have words. It’s a feeling of shame that I feel goes deep inside my being kind of to the point of curling my toes and my fingers. It’s a sense of shame and it’s a deep belief. Goodness is important to me, and it’s a deeply imprinted belief that sex and goodness are antithetical. That’s a myth that I’ve spent my life working to deal with. I wanted to share mine because it’s such a beautiful question and I wanted to kind of model a little bit of answering that question. That’s beautiful, Ken. I’ve worked a lot with shame as I’m sure you have. Personally, and in my work with folks, shame is a big one. Isn’t it? It can hijack our ability to own our truth in our lives. It can just shut us down, and what’s the underbelly of that? What’s going on there? What have we taken in that we haven’t released yet? That is not us, but it’s in us. Well said. Asking this question and articulating even more fully, what the words are to that shame? Would that be the next step?
Healing Sexual Trauma
I know there are more questions, Mike, and I have a choice point question for you. What this is bringing up for me, as all the people who are listening, who have experienced sexual trauma and violation? I think I would like to pause and hear any insights because this is huge. It was one of the questions I was going to ask you. If you could address for folks, those of us who have experienced sexual abuse or sexual trauma and have the deep trauma reverberations inside our being, how do people in that situation? Do you have any thoughts you want to share about the healing journey around that? I was glad that you added that, Ken, because I’ve worked a lot with sexual trauma. I can talk about a case with a person I’m working with right now. The first thing I would say with this is in order for us to open to our trauma, we have to feel safe enough to do that. If you’re working on your own and beginning to open that box, pay attention to what’s happening for you, pay attention to your body. Sometimes, memories have been kind of stored in there and then they start to emerge. I’ve worked with folks where that’s been the case. If you find yourself feeling that your trauma has limited you and you want to do the work of washing it out, go slow and be gentle. As you open to what happened, learn about how, then how you respond to what happened. I’ll tell you why. I worked with a woman who had been date-raped in college. It was interesting. After it happened, she repressed the whole thing. She pushed it down. She forgot about it. She was pretty promiscuous in college afterward, and we wondered if that was a component, if the trauma was playing out on some level. Anyway, it reemerged. After she got married, she had had a satisfying sex life with her partner, but about a year into the marriage, all the trauma came up in front and center, and her body completely shut down. I worked with her for about a year when I’d had the partner come in sometimes. She had an awesome husband. I loved this guy. He was great, but the key was helping her open to that she’s in control, that she’s the one, that she gets to decide about her body. She holds the reigns and nobody else holds the reins around her sexuality. It was a very healing work. Since safety is the first order of business for many people working on trauma, it is good to get help, right? Absolutely, especially with trauma because it’s overwhelming. Remember, trauma occurs in a relationship, trauma is healed in a relationship. I encourage folks who have had to deal with that to get help. Here’s another question. This is not in any way to discount the importance of therapy and doing trauma work, but if trauma can be healed through relationship, how can trauma be healed through your relationship with yourself? Let’s say you’re a single person. You’re not having sex. Maybe you’re having sex occasionally with people that you date. Maybe you’re having recreational sex. Maybe you’re just masturbating and wanting to do your healing work in that. Could you share thoughts in addition to, or on the side, even instead of, therapy, what are ways that people can heal sexual trauma and sexual wounding in their relationship with themselves before they are in a partnership? It’s a good question. I relate to it. I think I did a lot of my healing as a single person. Own your disabilities from a place of empowerment instead of shame.CLICK TO TWEETI have talked a lot about being in a support group for chronically single psychotherapists, and Mike was one of my support group members. We were in this together. We were. It was very healing for us. I loved that group. I would say, the first step, if you’re going to work on this on your own is do the work on every level. There’s the mind. That’s what we talked about the myths, the messages, do that work, and understand how it lives in your body from an insight perspective. Also, get to know your body. If you had trauma, how does the trauma impact your relationship to your body? How do you feel about your body? I’m working with a gentleman right now who’s had major trauma. I gave him an exercise, “Just lay naked on your bed and notice sensations of what’s happening. Just slow down.” A lot emerged for him because he had never thought to do that before. I would encourage you to slow things down and get to know what goes on inside your head, what goes on inside your body, what’s your relationship to your body? Do your best to keep a deep sense of curiosity, just noticing it all. What a powerful, beautiful, and simple exercise for reflection. It can be very powerful. The other thing that I encourage you to do is all of us have what we call an erotic blueprint. All of us have our own unique algorithm that allows our sensual sexual energy to come alive. There’s more direct stimulation. There’s the senses, our sensuality, and then there’s what we call psychogenic, which is thoughts, feelings, fantasies, what have you. Do some exploration around “what’s your erotic blueprint? How does your sexual energy begin to hum? I ask folks, “How does your erotic engine get turned on and humming? What happens there?” Get deeply curious because we’re all a little different in that place. That’s wonderful. That’s something I talk about too in my book, like different components of that are what moves you in sex. What emotionally moves you? What makes you feel safe, and what turns you on, and holding all of those together is. that’s the rich place. That’s the wonderful place. I want to share, Mike, the genesis of this episode. You and I were in a cafe together maybe 6 or 7 years ago. I don’t know if you remember this, but I remember it so vividly. We were sitting there drinking our ice coffee together, and I asked you, “In your work as a sex therapist at this point,what’s exciting you the most?” What you said was beautiful and powerful to me. I would like you to speak about that a little bit and I’ll say what that was. This is what you said to me. Tell me because I don’t remember.

Tips For The Chronically Single
Mike, this is so beautiful, so rich and I have some more questions for you. Sure. What about people who’ve been chronically single for a long time and want to get out into the dating world, and are just afraid and feel rusty with dating? Ken, you shared. We were in our chronically single therapist group. I think what I would say with that, where I come from that, I think about how I tortured myself about that. I labeled myself. I used it as an identity, “I’m chronically single,” and I’ve been partnered now for thirteen years. I look back at the young man. I used that label to torture myself. I think the first step is, so you’ve been single for a long time. That’s all it means; you’ve been single for a long time. It doesn’t mean you’re defective. It doesn’t mean you’re broken. It doesn’t mean that nobody’s ever going to want to date you. All it means is that you’ve been single for a long time. That’s all it means. Don’t take that like Ken and I did and run with that and torture yourself with it. That’s all it is. It’s just data. It’s information. You’ve been single for a long time. What’s your next step toward taking a risk and getting up there again? If you want to internet date, great. If you don’t, great. If you want to take a class, I had a client, who met her partner in an Italian class. She took an Italian class and ended up meeting her partner. What’s your next step? Seeing it through the lens of this, I keep coming back to this word, journey. Do your best not to focus on this destination of, “Where is my partner?” See it as a journey of moving toward this person. I remember and it is true, it’s such a cliche when they talk about it, it comes out of nowhere, what have you, but it is true. When I met my partner, I met my partner at Big Apple Ranch, which is a gay square dance in the middle of Manhattan. I remember the night so well because it was all I could do not to cancel. If I hadn’t promised my friend to meet him at this thing, I would never have gone. I remember getting into the shower and being like, “Why am I going to this thing?” I don’t even like country music. I just was not there, but I showed up and my partner was there and I’ve been with him for thirteen years. You just don’t know. You just have to keep taking the next step and do your best to not frame it from a negative place. Mike, I’m smiling because I quote you all the time in my classes and my courses without mentioning who you are. This is another thing that relates to that because when you were searching, or maybe it was when you first met Steve, and I said to you, “What are you doing now that’s different?” You said, “Ken, I’ll tell you what I’m doing. I get home from work and the last thing I want to do in the world is to take a shower and get dressed and go out.” It literally makes me feel sick to my stomach, but I know that if I don’t do that and go to events where there are spiritual gay men, I will never find my partner, and I quote you on that all the time. Sexual energy is powerful. It's beautiful energy. It's healing energy. It's vitality. It's an awesome part of living on this planet.CLICK TO TWEETIt is because that’s exactly what happened when I met Steve. I’m telling you; I remember getting into the shower like I can’t breathe. I’m dragging my butt up the Seventh Avenue. I lived in the West Village at the time. I think I remember that walk. I was dragging myself into that building, but it’s true, we have to get in the ring, don’t we? We have to get in the ring and the ring also includes doing the rich sexual questioning and mining of treasures that you are describing. I have another question for you. I want to talk about the whole issue of hooking up. This is a show for people who are into the conscious search for love so we don’t talk that much about hooking up. I think many people here don’t do that. I think that there are also many people who do that and wonder how they feel about it, and wonder if it’s a good thing to do. I would like us to talk for a few minutes about this issue of this conscious journey of healing. If your commitment is toward healing, and you’re single and you want sex, how to hold this issue of hooking up? I would love to hear any of your thoughts. Firstly, I want to preface this by saying, I’m a sex-positive sex therapist. What I mean by that is, if the sex is consensual, respectful, and safe and everybody in the room, regardless of how many people are in the room, are having pleasure, if everyone is having pleasure, then rock and roll. I don’t judge any of that. Now, that said, if you’re recognizing that who you are in that context, your behavior, what you’re doing, if you are starting to get those inner promptings of, “This is not really reflective of my deepest truth. This is not reflective of who I want to be. This is not my wisest self that’s doing that.” You’re wanting to deepen into, “What is my wisest self with respect to the challenging conundrum of being a sexual being?” Some of us have very high sex drives, and being single and needing that release and needing that outlet. Trust me, I very much empathize with that. That said, if you’re feeling like, “This is not who I want to be here,” do some exploration. What is the part of you that’s doing the hooking up? What is that part wanting? What’s going on there? Do your best to open to compassion. We heal through compassion, not judgment. Do your best to soften the gaze, let the inner critical wounded part of you ask him or her to step outside for a moment and do some compassionate learning about, “What’s happening in this place? What’s going on?” There’s the part that is doing something here. There’s the part that is acting in a way that’s not in alignment with who you want to be, and so you want to get curious, partner with this part of you. Learn about what’s going on there. It may feel better to hook up and to engage in casual sex in a way that ultimately doesn’t feel right to you, but maybe it’s serving you because it’s helping you not feel more vulnerable feelings. Maybe it’s helping you to distract yourself from feelings that otherwise would be knocking on your door. What I say with that is to get curious, slow down, and learn about it. Whatever you do, don’t beat yourself up. There are always good reasons for why this stuff plays out the way it does. Beautiful. Thank you, Mike. I agree with you. It’s important that even when we are acting in ways that might be not great for us sexually, that we still hold the beauty of our sexuality and remember that first and primarily. That’s wonderful. Mike, you’ve shared so many rich, wonderful things. One thing that I’ve appreciated is you have articulated all of these kinds of thorny and important and highly charged issues as a journey that we can be kind to ourselves around and curious and exploratory, which is what I love about your work and why I so wanted to have you on the show. I’m glad you picked up on that, Ken. It’s a fundamental tenet of how I work with folks and I help them open to their journey through the eyes of compassion, not judgment. You have been through that journey and we are all on that journey together.
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Trump, Coronavirus, And The Greatest Lesson Of Love
Acknowledging The Devastating Effects Of A Toxic Relationship

Married To A Narcissist
By looking at these personal relationships, we can understand more what seems to be happening at this time in our country. I think that on both counts, this is pressing and urgent, and I have a lot to say. It’s going to be hard. It’s going to be a kind of cautionary tale, but it’s also going to be filled with hope because when we can see a hypnosis for what it is, we can break free from a toxic relationship. I want to say, this is not about Trump’s policies. This is not about being a Democrat or being a Republican. It’s about character. What’s being acted out in the state of our country and in the world is that many Americans have fallen in love with a profound narcissist. The sign there, the key great difficulty, is the inability to de-center from what you want and the importance of how you’re perceived, and to be able to actually look at the world with great empathy. I think it would be really hard to disagree that this is an area where Donald Trump is profoundly weak, and where that weakness, specifically in regard to Coronavirus, has led to death, death of loved ones, more deaths to follow of our precious loved ones because Coronavirus is not something that Trump wants to admit to or deal with because it doesn’t make him look good. The description of this kind of narcissism was beautifully described by E.B. Johnson in an article in Medium called How your personality changes after surviving narcissistic abuse. “Narcissistic abuse,” the author says, or a toxic relationship, I add in, “occurs through verbal abuse, emotional manipulation, and even all-out campaigns of fear, threats, and terror. A narcissist is unable to see the inherent value in anyone else because they’re only able to see their needs, desires, and perspectives.” Let’s talk about this on a personal level. How many of us have been in relationships with a narcissist? How many of us have been in a toxic relationship with someone who couldn’t de-center from their own needs and would hurt us and hurt others because of their inability to choose compassion over self-gratification? How many people do you know now that are in those situations? How many times have you had loved ones in situations of relationships with people where you knew that this was so bad for them and these otherwise really intelligent people when you tried to show them the facts, their eyes would kind of glaze over? They would have rationalizations; they would have excuses. How many times have we done that? How to capture the degree of pain and lost years and suffering, not to mention abuse, not to mention abuse of our children, not to mention the loss of friendships and other relationships, because the narcissist feels threatened by those other connections and other alliances, and pushes us to dissolve them, from the subtlest level to the grossest level?
Toxic Hypnosis
This is such a deep and important thing. I’m going to shift to talking about intimate relationships. Ultimately, when you’re weighing character in one hand and promise in the other, character is going to end up on top. In the long run, character is what’s going to influence everything. I quote Hara Marano, the Advice Columnist for Psychology Today frequently and she says, “There are three Cs in looking for love; character, character, and character.” We are 4% of the world’s population, but in July, we had over 50% of all the Coronavirus cases. To keep our country safe, we must have a leader who can step outside of themselves and see the needs of others.CLICK TO TWEETIn July, Trump said, “We have one of the lowest death rates.” But of all the countries in the world, we have the fourth-highest death rate and we’re one of the wealthiest and most industrialized nations in the world. We have an incredible opportunity here to save lives, to save our lives, and to understand the first rule of intimacy is that character is everything. All of us have certainly seen such terrible things happen as we witness our loved ones in toxic relationships. How much pain have each of us experienced seeing that and being helpless? Right now, we’re witnessing that in our country today because of Donald Trump’s inability, in his case, narcissism, to understand the validity and worth of anything outside of what he wants and needs and how he is perceived. The country’s being ripped apart. As a country, we are now so hungry to be able to finally address racism in a deeper way. Trump is denying all of that and turning it into an ugly civil war because Coronavirus crosses him, it doesn’t look good, it goes against what he wants to be seen as, and the experience of him feeling like he’s wearing a mask makes him feel weak. He’s not interested in what he’s modeling for the country and all of his supporters. He’s just not interested in that. What he’s interested in is how he looks and this is an interesting thing. The inner world of a narcissist crossed is it has rancidity, it’s a rancid place. None of the oxygen that comes with getting outside yourself exists in that inner world. In that space, the narcissist wants to drag other people into that space. Trump, as the most powerful person in many ways on the planet, is trying to drag the entire country into the rancid space of his resentment, insecurity, and rage when it comes to Coronavirus and the reality of this pandemic. It is breathtaking to see how many people willingly follow him into that space. That brings me to my second point about this and that is the hypnosis that occurs when you’re in love with, or when stuck in, a toxic relationship. This hypnosis is one of the most powerful things that I have ever witnessed. I will share with you that my dad, who’s a holocaust survivor, said, “I can understand how to turn a population into Nazis. I can understand how to do what Hitler did. Here’s how you do it. You sow fear, and then you create an enemy, and you make that enemy less than you.” He does that with all his enemies and that foments hate and creates a degree of danger, violence, resentment, and unrest because there is no modeling of humanity and decency. That hypnosis happens as well for people in toxic relationships. We’ve all seen it. We’ve seen it in our own lives, and we’ve seen it in the lives of people we love. It’s powerful and it’s so intractable and it goes so deep. For example, really smart people don’t wear masks because they feel that it is anti-Trump. The rally in Tulsa, smart people were in that rally. They signed papers saying that they would not hold the administration accountable if they caught the Coronavirus and people died as a result most probably from that rally. Then they were pushed together into a tight space so that it would look good for the optics as though there were more people. People did this willingly in the time of a deadly pandemic. This is so rich and so amazing and tells us so much about willingly entering into toxic relationships. I want to say something now about the message of hope, peace, because ultimately for survival, all of us must choose to get away from toxic relationships. For our country’s safety, in the presence of a pandemic, and all of the other crises that happen, we must have a leader, Democrat or Republican, who has compassion, who can step outside themselves and see the needs of others.
A Time For Hope
For this episode, I’m speaking mostly about Coronavirus. I do want to say something about hope. The beautiful bravery of changing direction when we see truth, the ability to do what a narcissist cannot do, which is de-center from our own agenda, and open our hearts to the humanity of what’s going on. All of us now have the opportunity to do that on a multitude of levels. We can see how the power of narcissism is playing out in our country and literally leading to death to a country lost, blind, and bewildered because its leadership is not saying we’re directly and wisely going to tackle this pandemic. We must get away from this administration’s narcissistic and toxic response to crisis. I’m a Democrat, but this is not about Democrat or Republican. This is about character. This is a message that also applies in our personal lives, for all of us who are stuck in relationships and so many of us know this experience where we are repeatedly, even if it’s not this extreme, even if it’s not at all about what leads to death. The experience of being in a relationship where we don’t feel seen, where we don’t feel cherished, where we don’t have license to be all that we are. The damage that that creates, the damage that creates for us, for our children, and for our loved ones. It’s such an act of bravery to open our eyes, to douse the hypnosis, and to face the reality of what’s going on and to say yes to compassion for ourselves, to say yes to compassion for all the people that are being wounded by a narcissist’s toxic, rage, and behaviors. This is a time for hope. This is a time where all of us can say, “We need a leader who cares. We need a leader who is compassionate.” We are in the midst of a pandemic. We need to take care of what needs to be taken care of. It’s not something a narcissist can do. I know that this is such a political message, but as a human being in this world, I feel that I must stand up when unnecessary deaths are being caused by narcissism, just as I stand up for the same thing in all of my talks about attractions of deprivation. Even after, God willing, this election, assuming Trump does not win again, because if he does, much more horror, horror born of a lack of compassion, will occur. Even after, even if we don’t have Trump as president again, there will be a period of healing that needs to happen. Wounds around race have been ripped up. Racism has been allowed to flourish and to gain fire. This pandemic has gained so much fuel because of Trump and his administration’s refusal to honor the reality of what’s going on. This is hard to refute. There’s a lot of healing that needs to happen. For all of us who have been in a relationship with a narcissist, there’s so much healing that needs to happen even when we get away from that relationship. It’s hard and it’s difficult because we’ve allowed such wrong things to happen, to ourselves and to other people, and because we’ve gotten into such a kind of channel of pain and suffering and diminishment of compassion. All of us as a nation are going to have to heal when we make this choice to move away from abuse, to move away from narcissism, in our lives, in our relationship, and in our president. Thank you so much for listening. I know this was a controversial episode, but we must speak the truth when it comes to the wellbeing of those around us. Thanks so much for listening. I’ll see you in two weeks on the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast.Important Links:
- Deeper Dating
- Donald Trump
- How your personality changes after surviving narcissistic abuse
- Hara Marano
- Psychology Today
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Deeper Dating Q&A: Expert Advice For All Your Questions About Love, Dating And Sex
Your Questions Answered By Ken

Choosing Partners
I think to do is human and to edit one’s doing is divine and very hard for me as a workaholic, but I am going to be still doing the podcast, but just once every two weeks now, at least for a period of time, as I help DeeperDating.com come into life in the world. Thank you for understanding that. Let me jump right now into the questions. I’m going to answer these a little bit more quickly than I usually do because there are so many questions that I’ve gotten. The first one is from my friend, Maria Elena from Mexico, and Maria Elena asked it’s a wonderful question. She said, “I have a really strong personality and I have been attracted to, and I attract men who also have really strong personalities and characters. These relationships have ended quickly and have not done well. Should I instead be looking for somebody with a gentler nature because I have a really strong personality has an easier lighter personality who can accommodate me so that we’re not kind of butting heads together?” That was her question. I’m going to answer this question, but I also just want to encourage, I’d love there to be a kind of crowdsourcing thing, because I think that I can kind of come up with little chunks of wisdom or insight that might be really important and sometimes a really central, and sometimes they’re not as central. In my groups, in my intensives, I’ll share things and then, other people will share things that hit at the heart of things better than I could have. If anything you hear in terms of my answers or anybody else’s question inspires you to give a different response or a different angle, I’d always appreciate that and you can just go to, again, DeeperDatingPodcast.com, click Ask Ken, and share your perspectives. I can try to pass those on where it’s possible to do that. My thought about this is that, if two people with a really strong personality come together, there definitely is room for a particular kind of greater conflict, but I think that if a stronger person and a more passive person come together, there’s also room for more of that difficulty. If two people with really strong personalities come together, there definitely is room for a particular kind of greater conflict.CLICK TO TWEETI personally think, ultimately, it’s about the skills of intimacy, more than anything else, because sometimes, really different even conflicting styles can be exciting and can add a sense of life and variety if both partners are willing to learn the other person’s language of being, and style of being. I think It’s more about communication skills. You’ve got a strong opinion, your partner has a strong opinion, how can you both hold that together as the couple that you are and talk about it, work it through and express what’s going on? I think it’s more about communication than particular kind of character styles. Although obviously, different character styles are going to create a different recipe for a relationship, but I really do think ultimately, if a person is not abusive, if you are not abusive, that it’s just so much more about learning the kind of like deeper, basic communication skills. Thank you, Maria Elena, for asking that question. Next, Jordan asks a question. Jordan is working on the Deeper Dating book and is in chapter two and that’s fabulous. Those are really rich chapters and has met somebody wonderful. The connection is great, the physical sexual connection is great. She feels comfortable in her own skin with this person more than she ever has since she’s been eighteen years old. These are all wonderful things and I just love hearing that. I’m thrilled that you are leading with who you are and you found somebody with whom you can be who you are and she says, the communication is great. Recently though, she has left some texts and not gotten responses to them and that’s really scary because her experience in the past has also been with guys who are cheating on her and who she believes that are in a monogamous relationship with her but in fact, they’re cheating on her. These kinds of like dropped texts are a real sign of that. It’s very scary and Jordan feels like she’s going to talk to him about this whole issue of monogamy because that’s what she wants and she just asked for some advice on how to do that. First of all, I just want to say you if are with someone with whom you can communicate and whom you feel so good with those are signs in all probability of deep growth on your part. What I would say in the simplest terms is that you do need to talk to him and you can share that there has been trauma and wounding for you. It’s a funny point that you’re at because Jordan says they’d been on a handful of dates, I figured maybe like 4 maybe 5 dates, something like that. Feelings can really be growing deeply at that point, but it’s kind of early to say we are going to absolutely move to monogamy in some cases because some people who might and will be ultimately available, aren’t ready to say that yet, after just that many dates. I think one question there is, is this a shared commitment? Is this something that he believes in, is looking for, and aspires to? Does he feel like that is a direction that he sees this possibly going in so that there’s space for him as well? You can share, and there needs to be room for the fact that this is scary and difficult for you and then continue the conversation from there.The Color Of Love
I think that you might actually become closer as you have that conversation, but I also want to really encourage you because you have trauma there, and kind of a hallmark of trauma is black and white thinking. It’s easy to go to the biggest fears and that’s not something he necessarily needs to be responsible for in the communication. I say, if you have dear friends who honor your commitment to monogamy and are spacious and nonjudgmental, talk to them and get support to help you be able to really talk to him from an open space. I’m excited for you and let us know what happens. Next question or request, Lou left a message and thanked me for the podcast and the work that I’m doing and asked if I would reflect on kind of some of the issues of what it is like for people of color, to face the institutionalized racism that they experienced so often in online dating?
Love Advice: The world surprises us with who we meet. Bravery, expression, and protection of other people are the deepest values of activism. In that way, allow yourself to be surprised.